Fallen
by ValidDreams
Summary: Valla's fall from grace is badly timed with a mage to hunt and Imoen to retrieve. The voices are even louder than before and she has nothing but her own will and fragmented mind to drive them back. Exploring a Fallen Paladin's struggles with the Taint, SOA through TOB.
1. Begin

**Fallen**

* * *

"I'm not one of their blighted Fallen, you pigeon-toed whoreson!"

The swearing echoed through the halls of the Radiant Heart's headquarters and while there was some muffled snickering between some of the squires standing watch at the doors, a hard look from Bjornin silenced them. He and Keldorn shared a look next. "We'd best see what that's about before it brings the Prelate down on our heads," he said good-humoredly, motioning for the entry hall.

An emasculated shriek came next following by a clamor of chainmail and more shouting and they hastened to the disturbance.

A City Guard was down on his knees clutching himself where his armor left his codpiece exposed. Two of his brothers in arms were wrestling a third that was bound at the arms on the floor, one of them held in a strangle hold between the bound figure's thighs and desperately trying to escape as the other was attempting to negotiate the sea of twisted limbs to reach them.

His solution was expedient and to be expected of the Guard, however. He grabbed the stranger beneath the chin—as their head was shaved completely clean—and wrenched their head backward to expose their throat.

"You aren't worth the bounty on Fallen, wretch!"

Keldorn drew his sword in an instant and the motion was echoed by Bjornin at his side and every squire in his hall.

The guard had no choice but to take notice.

An instant later, the knife was knocked from his hand with a casual swat and the prisoner was jumping to their feet, propelling themselves upward at an angle carefully aimed as to send the back of their skull crashing into the man's undefended face.

A twisting kick sent him to the floor, where he struck his head upon the marble and lost consciousness.

The prisoner then turned to look at Keldorn and Bjornin.

Before them stood a spindly, hollow-eyed creature almost so gaunt and dirty as to be androgynous with its hair cut down to the barest stubble peppering the crown. However, there was something in the shape of the eyes and the high arching cheekbones that spoke of a woman who had once been quite pretty despite the scar that split the corner of her lips and another pair near the corner of her eye. But those eyes, large and gold like a fox's or some other wild beast's, were feral and her stance was crouched, her shoulders rounded.

And there was something else too. It wasn't the dark gray cloud of her aura, the despair that issued forth from the soul of someone who had been severed from their god, because that he knew well enough. It was something else. Something _other_ and dark that was _of_ the girl and not something brought upon her. Reaching out for it with his senses yielded nothing, like trying to grasp a shadow between one's hands.

Bjornin suddenly took a breath, short and sharp, and jerked forward. "Valla?" he said, his shock echoing in the arched ceilings of the Hall. "Valla, gods be good, is that you? Speak, girl! What's happened to you?"

The girl physically flinched. "I don't know you," she said, her voice too small to sound cross but her expression stormy and uncomfortable, her lips twisting. She had the look of a wild thing, cornered, and desperate for escape. "I just want to go. Please, these ropes… "

Bjornin frowned deeply. "Keldorn, something's terribly wrong," he murmured. "I know this girl. She shouldn't be travelling alone. She has friends—godparents—and a good company looking out for her. Call the clerics for the guards, I'll try to talk to her."

Keldorn grabbed his arm. "If she is Fallen, you know—"

"She never accepted my offer to join the Order. It's out of our hands." Bjornin smiled. "It is strange how that sometimes turns out for the best, isn't it?"

The other man nodded and looked to the girl. "She looks like she could use a cleric too," he said. "If you can—"

Keldorn's good intentions were cut off by the double doors of the front hall being kicked in upon their hinges with enough force to wake the dead in the crypts of Neverwinter several thousand leagues away. "Where is our Valla? Minsc and Boo demand to know!"

"Minsc, contain yourself, please!"

The Rashemi was a bizarre sight, to say the least. He stood even taller than Keldorn himself, who was not a small man by any means, and was built like a siege engine and was, in utter contrast to everything the old Paladin knew about Rashemi, shaved completely bald from the crown of his head to the point of his chin. Then there was the rodent that was perched upon his shoulder and… and well, a man his size could keep whatever company he wanted to.

On his heels was an older and frazzled looking half-elven woman—a druid if the assortment of braids and wooden beads in her dark hair and pouches of components at her hips meant anything. But her complexion looked like it had had all its color taken from it and her eyes looked far too old for her years and haunted by something dark indeed.

Bjornin, for his part, looked actually quite relieved by this turn of events and even reached out to take the druid's hand to greet her. But this was one interruption too many and the next door that was opened was done so quietly but the presence it brought with it spoke volumes without a single word.

"Ah." The Prelate crossed the hall with measured steps that echoed in the chamber. He appeared to be caught somewhere between annoyance and reluctant amusement as he surveyed the squires quietly attempting to drag the guards away, the Rashemi towering importantly nearby as if challenging him to call to question his presence, and the skeletal looking Fallen at the center of it. He looked to Keldorn. "I did wonder what was happening that my senior officers were finding so difficult to reign in. It seems we have a circus on a doorstep."

Keldorn smiled at the man. "In some climes, they face either droughts or floods and nothing in between."

"It seems we can relate at this moment. What about this girl? She has obviously Fallen."

"She was never part of the Order, Sir," Bjornin spoke up. "But I know these people and I'd like to request that the Order provides them sanctuary for a time." He gestured to the slender, sunken-eyed girl that was being fussed over by the druid now. She had even been cut free and Keldorn could see now the blood that was crusting around her wrists and running down her palms from where the ropes had dug into wide, pre-existing wounds. "This girl here is Valla of Candlekeep They sing songs about her all over the Sword Coast. She cleared the mines in Nashkel. She's the Hero of Baldur's Gate, Prelate."

One of the squires lost his grip on the guard he was dragging and began to mutter quiet curses, punctuating this statement. The others began to whisper among themselves.

The Prelate simply raised his eyebrows. "Indeed?"

"We have others among us," the druid spoke up quickly. "You might not welcome them here, Prelate. Bjornin, you're very kind—"

"The priestess?" Bjornin asked.

"Well, yes. And a bounty hunter."

"I will vouch for them. If the priestess still aligns herself with Valla that gives no one any reason to distrust her. The same goes for your rogue."

The half-elf rolled her eyes. "He will be grateful, but I hope you don't expect her to say any such thing."

Bjornin waved away her words. "Prelate, you have my word."

The Prelate nodded, his expression inscrutable as he considered the small group. "Of course, Bjornin. They'll take the quarters meant for visiting knights. Our brothers will have to forgive us if they find their charity tested."

* * *

Bjornin had to be elsewhere for an assignment, but did not need to ask Keldorn to stay with the small group to make sure they had all they required.

He had his own curiosity to feed, after all. He even quite liked them, even if the priestess that both the druid—a Harper, he realized eventually when realizing that Harpers were trained to pack their belongings a certain way and she seemed to organize everything thusly—and Bjornin had been so mysterious about had turned out to be a drow, of all creatures. A beautiful thing of ageless, obsidian skin and garnet-colored eyes with a voice like silk, but a tongue like a poisoned blade.

Not even the healing she provided was painless.

Valla's thin, abused form twisted and writhed upon a pallet on the floor—the safest place for such things—as the drow leaned over her, clutching her holy symbol and invoking her goddess with a musical, mournful sounding vocalization that came from the back of her throat.

"Don't watch."

Keldorn looked to the druid. Jaheira, he had learned. She had placed a pot of tea freshly brewed from herbs she had chosen herself between them and was preparing two cups. "How can I ignore it?" he asked in a whisper.

"She requested it."

"Yes, I… I don't understand."

Valla had nearly climbed the wall to get away from the Order cleric that had been presented to tend to her and it had taken the Berserker, of all people, to keep her feet planted firmly on the floor as Jaheira ushered the elderly woman out, thanking her for trying.

Jaheira sighed as she sank into the seat opposite of him and began to rub at her eyes tiredly. "Right now, a stranger healing her would be just too much. Viconia will place her in a trance after their session is complete. She won't remember any of the pain."

He nodded at this and hesitated to speak again, for a moment. Then, unable to stop himself, he pressed on. "My lady, I have to ask: what's happened to your group? It was mere months ago that we received word of how you had stopped the war and it seems you've fallen on hard times indeed."

She raised her dark eyes to meet his and shook her head. "Shortly after leaving Baldur's Gate, our party was taken captive—ambushed or drugged, none of us remember. What we know is that we were transported here, to Amn, and held in a facility kept secret under the Promenade." She paused, measuring her words. "Our captor, a mage, tortured us, but Valla and her sister… they suffered most extensively at his hands."

Keldorn's gut ached and he looked again to the girl sprawled shirtless and face-down in the cot. The drow was, with strange tenderness, smoothing a hand over her patient's sweaty scalp as she checked her work. Her whole body, up her arms to her shoulders and all across her back where they were most numerous, was covered in jagged white lines that fanned out like spider-webs or chains of lightning across her flesh. Her wrists and ankles were heavily scarred from periods of restraint and struggling against it and there was another scar that ran up from her front but he could only see how it twisted over her side across her ribs nearly to the base of her shoulder. There were other places where pieces looked missing, like the flesh had been cut away and hadn't come back flush with the rest, leaving an indentation.

She couldn't have been any older than two and twenty. Maybe five and twenty, if he reached.

"I'm sorry," he whispered. "I'm… that isn't enough, I know. By the gods, how could this—so much for the Cowled Ones monitoring all magical use. Foul, useless creatures…"

"I imagine our mad mage had means of covering his tracks," Jaheira explained. Her tone was professional and detached, like a scout giving a report, but there was something ferocious in her eyes that hungered; an anger that had not yet been fed its fill. "He made them look like children in the Promenade. Even so, they managed to take him and with him, Imoen. You cannot say she is being held justly. So, we shall hold them to count as well…"

"I wouldn't dream of saying anything the Cowled Ones do is just," Keldorn replied with a shake of his head. "It was a mistake, giving them so much power. Superstition should not rule as it does. But the nobility…" He sighed and shook his head again, this time to clear a thought. "It doesn't matter. What does matter is getting your Imoen back and finding this madman. I'd like to help you."

Jaheira nodded. "We could certainly use it, though that decision lies with Valla. I'm sure when her mind clears, she'll agree." She took a breath and crossed her arms, cradling her elbows and frowning pensively. "We have lost too much."

"Yes, I wanted to ask," Keldorn said, frowning. "There… Bjornin made a comment it sounded… well, I expected to meet your husband?"

The druid's expression, for just a second, crumbled. Then it hardened again. "I would have very much liked to introduce you to him," she said. "However, he was taken from us. That is another of the many things Irenicus will pay for."

The number of ways and means by which he could have been taken, each more horrifying than the last, and all of them possible as he considered the scars upon Valla's back, flashed in Keldorn's mind. He drew a breath to steady himself and calm his anger. "My condolences. I know how little that must mean, but…"

She nodded again, solemn and silent.

He offered to her his hand and, after a moment, she accepted it. He held it between his two and squeezed it gently, attempting to convey the depth of his sympathy. "May I know his name?"

"Khalid. He was my Khalid."

Keldorn nodded, but before he could say anymore, the drow appeared in his periphery. She moved silently, but the scent of incense clung to her clothing and her skin and her presence weighed heavily on his senses.

"Shar has been merciful," Viconia began evenly as she addressed them. She seemed pleased, with herself and her work, but her ageless face looked drawn and tired. "I was able to purge the rot from Valla's wounds and undo a great deal of the damage wreaked upon her by the madman. It is good we found each other in such a timely way. However, there is nothing I can do about the scars. They will have to remain. Perhaps you know of a balm or some other remedy to fade them, but to heal them? It would cause undo pain and put her at more risk than vanity is worth. It isn't pleasant—to regrow flesh."

Jaheira was frowning. "A balm might lighten the color, but there are areas where he _carved_ into her…"

"I saw that," the priestess said. Her jaw had tightened briefly and something angry and dark had flashed in her eyes, but it was gone in an instant. "I have placed her in a trance so that she will rest. She will wake when she feels fit. You may move or let her lay where she is, but if you do, you should not linger here and talk. You will disturb her." She inclined her head ever so slightly and then turned away. "I am going to rest as well. I have arranged to take dinner elsewhere—do not seek me out. I will be in my chambers later if I am required."

With that, she was gone.

Keldorn shook his head. "Is she really trust—?"

"She has never proven herself to be anything else," Jaheira cut in with a shake of her head. "And as long as she is welcomed by Valla, I accept her."

"Is there any reason Valla trusts her?"

"Valla…" The druid paused and took a breath. "She understands what it is to be an outcast." She shook her head. "She might be able to tell you better than I when she wakes. But come, we don't want to disturb her rest."

* * *

The featureless black void gifted by Viconia's goddess was more comforting to Valla than she thought it ought to be given who exactly that goddess was. But gift horses and mouths and such…

It was nothing and in it she was able to be nothing for a short time as well. There, she was removed from herself and her body and the weights that dragged on behind her. She was a mind in an empty field and it was an escape, however temporary, from the pressure she felt building up within; like a fossil or a piece of carbon being crushed under the weight of a hundred million pounds of rock and time.

If nothing else, here there were no dreams.

No voices.

No skulls that whispered or fingers that pulled. No arms that wrapped around her and tried to deceive her with warmth and hollow affection and promises to make it all right—_I'm here. L__et your father make it right, little one.  
_

It was always getting worse.

The blurry glimpses and shadows of the past had given way to visions that felt so lifelike that she woke up screaming. Among rolling mists, she walked war-torn battlefields steeped so deeply in bodies the ground couldn't be seen; in a stone hall with an endless ceiling she wore a crown of steel and obsidian so real she could feel the press of the metal against her skull; she waded naked into a lake of blood only to realize that it wasn't a lake but a bath and she relished how warm it was before she laid back and let it close around her…

Irenicus did not haunt her. His cutting blue eyes and the memory off his endless torture, the tables he had held her down upon, and the walls he had chained her to were almost like moments of respite from the terrible things her blood could tell her.

If only he knew.

She would have liked, at least, to have been able to throw that in his face before the Cowled Bastards had taken him away.

She'd settle now for rubbing it in whenever she managed to pin him down and carve her name into the flesh of his heart before she tore it out.

Valla felt the fire drain away from her quickly, not sure if it was her imagination or if the void really did siphon away emotions. It was probably a good thing given how angry she felt all the time lately but it wouldn't last. Viconia indulged her like a mother might a child, but she knew that the drow's mood would change. Eventually the priestess would force her to face the dreams again and the fury she woke up to the next morning. It was her way. Those that were coddled did not survive, after all…

It was probably for the best.

Once upon a time, Valla had prided herself on forging her own fate; on her control.

She needed to find that sense again. God or no god.

* * *

Valla languished in the trance for the whole night and into the next afternoon.

Keldorn might have felt the need to intervene for her sake if squabbling had not immediately broken out among the group about her state sometime after dinner.

The Rashemi, as he was wont to do for anyone it seemed, was defending the priestess.

The rogue was mediating.

The women were at a stalemate.

It seemed wholly unnatural to the druid. To the priestess, nothing seemed more normal than desiring dreamless, uninterrupted rest after so many months without it. They should, she advised, take the time to familiarize themselves with the city. It was all they could do to aid her now.

The rogue, Yoshimo, who was light of foot and easy with smiles and who Keldorn found to be terribly pleasant and very good for a laugh for a man of his craft, agreed. In an attempt to direct the druid away from a counterargument, he volunteered to scour the slums for rumors and work. He would, he pointed out, not stand out there and therefore not be such a target for thieves or bullying guardsmen. It was, after all, where many immigrants ended up. It was also one of the areas of the city that the drow could walk relatively unbothered and she could go with him. They would be safer in pairs.

The Rashemi, either catching on or simply in the spirit of wishing to be useful, volunteered that he and his hamster could search the Bridge District and the Promenade. This drew fire from the half-elf who demanded to know if Minsc really expected her to let him wander off on his own. She was then hauled up against the warrior's side and another team was made.

That had been the afternoon previous.

The sun was rising upon the party's third day at the hall and still their leader slept on.

Keldorn could not help but wonder at the protectiveness the young woman fostered in those around her. Surely someone that was credited with ending a war wouldn't need so much mothering—her age aside—but, then again, there was something else going on. The group as a whole was hiding something. It was most definitely about the girl and he suspected that it had something to do with that sense of otherness he had felt about her before. They were all nervous to be in the halls of the Order and it was for no reason that he could make sense of.

"I don't know you."

Keldorn turned to the voice, jarred from his reverie.

Valla's eyes were opened and she was observing him impassively from the bed. When it had become obvious that she would continue to sleep through the first night, Jaheira had asked Minsc to help move her if he could be gentle and the barbarian had done so readily, eager to aid where normally he was useless. She looked sickly against the white linens she laid upon, but her eyes were focused and bright with a spark of focus and clarity he had not seen in them before.

The old paladin turned toward her a little more fully, closing the volume of history he had been paying no mind to for the last hour or so since his thoughts had wandered. This was not the skittish waif he had met initially in the Great Hall. In fact, this tranquility was almost that of another person entirely and he wondered how the wizard had tampered with her mind to create these changes.

"I am Keldorn Firecam," he said gently. He stood and poured a cup of water for her from a decanter on the bedside. She accepted it readily and drained it at once. "I am a Paladin of the Order of the Most Radiant Heart, a friend of Bjornin's and of your friends too, actually. Jaheira asked me to sit with you for a spell."

It had been very early when he had bumped into the druid in the halls near the headquarter kitchens. She had been seeking more water for tea and upon spotting the darkened circles ensconcing her eyes, he had declared that she had no need of more tea, but real sleep. He admired her dedication. No one with eyes would dare question that. However, she was a mere mortal herself and would be of no use to Valla if she worked herself to the bone before they ever left Athkatla.

With only the very feeblest of protests—proof enough of just how exhausted the Harper was—she went off to bed and he took up her vigil at the girl's bedside.

"How long have I been...?"

"Two days."

She didn't react to this news. Her eyes simply wandered from ceiling to window and then around the sparsely furnished room. "Where are the others?"

"Bed, I'm sure. It's very early still."

The drow wouldn't sit with the girl as a matter of opinion. Valla, she insisted, was not an infant. She would wake before she thirsted herself to death or starved and that was simply that.

Minsc had not been asked. Keldorn suspected that the large man fidgeted too much, unable to contain the enormous amounts of energy and enthusiasm he stored like kindling. It would either be torture or counterproductive, so he was not asked.

And Yoshimo was simply not trusted it seemed. If Keldorn was reading Jaheira right, that is. She was happy to send him to market for the herbs she wanted and she seemed grateful for his agreeable conversation and general friendliness and that he got on well with every member of their merry group, even the drow. But she was careful not to leave him unattended around Valla as she slumbered and Keldorn wondered at that. He did not seem the sort to do anything untoward to a helpless girl. Certainly not to his benefactor? So, was there another reason?

Or, perhaps he was imagining it all. It was not strange that a Harper would be skittish around someone who was so opened about their professional skills as Yoshimo was about his.

"Khalid is usually up early. Would you check?"

Keldorn met the girl's eyes quickly. She was looking at him expectantly, having spoken in all seriousness. "I… my lady, do you not remember…?"

"Remember...?" she asked. "I need to see—" She stopped short, the words catching in her throat and her expression changing. "I knew… it felt wrong, but I didn't…" She looked away, blinking rapidly as her eyes became misty. "I'm sorry."

"Don't." He offered her a plain square of linen pulled from his pocket. It was not a fine as some kerchiefs some knights carried, but he never saw the point in frills or monograms that would be covered in blood or sweat in time anyway. She accepted and dabbed at her eyes and cheeks. "You've suffered a great trauma to your mind and body. These gaps should probably be expected. I am the one that is sorry, for everything."

Jaheira had spoken more, if only briefly, of her husband in the days passed and Minsc had confided in him about his young witch, Dynaheir, while they sparred the night before. He had broken into tears about his failure to save a treasured friend and companion—the failure of his dajemma forgotten and unimportant in the face of that. Losing Imoen to the Wizards had compounded his distress. In his eyes, it seemed, he was as responsible for Valla and Imoen as he had been for Dynaheir and retrieving the young magess was one of the only ways he believed he could restore himself.

Keldorn had done what he could to console the young man. Justice would come in time, he had said. He prayed for it every night.

"What is this place?"

He glanced at her again. "The headquarters for the Order in Athkatla. The Prelate has agreed to provide housing for your party here on Bjornin's word that you can all be trusted."

This seemed to take a moment to process.

And then she was trying to sit up, fighting with muscles that were stiff and sore from lying prone for so many days, but filled with a ferocity he hadn't expected. "We can't stay here," she said in a rush. "_I_ can't stay—this won't work—"

Keldorn was on his feet again and trying to fight her back into the bed as gently as he could manage. "You're safe here," he told her. "Please, calm down. Valla, listen to me, please!"

One of her hands locked around his left wrist with shocking force, but her eyes were on his and she was still.

He sat down on the bed slowly. Again, her eyes were those of an animal prepared to flee or die in the attempt. "No one will hurt you here," he whispered. "Bjornin will not let them. I will not. I swear that to you." He laid his free hand upon hers and began to gently massage her fingers, slowly loosening her hold, certain she had bruised him and baffled as to how something so frail... "The Order has no power over Fallen who did not take the mantle."

She was still tense, her whole body pulled taut like an archer's bowstring. "It isn't that," she said. "But thank you. You're being very kind and you must…" She stopped again and shook her head. "I'd like to dress. I'd like to walk somewhere and stretch a little…"

Keldorn nodded. There were so many questions on his mind, so many unanswered things, and the pile was ever growing. "I'll wait in the hall."

* * *

The water in the basin was cold, but washing felt good. It felt good to be dressed too, even though her muscles were stiff and were actively working against her.

Valla found new clothes among her things, a short, fitted vest of silky suede and a pair of loose, linen trousers that cuffed at the knee and laced at each hip. There was a leather belt among the pile as well and Sarevok's old sword propped against the wall beside a pair of shorter, tapered blades in matching sheaths. There was no trim or brocade work, no enchantments or added charms for protection, but it was all clean and bloodless and she would never overlook those simple blessings again.

She wondered how much of it had been bought and how much Yoshimo had quietly stolen. Not that it mattered. Up north, she had looked the other way when Imoen had picked pockets and filched goods to keep them from starving on their way to Nashkel when game proved scarce. Now, she supposed, she didn't even have to look the other way.

Outside of the Hall, the sky was still dark, though the horizon had begun to bleed red and orange, and in the distance, across the canals and streets, she could hear the first tolls of the bells from atop the Morninglord's church greeting his dawn.

"Do you go barefoot often?"

"Not really. I just… wanted to."

In truth, it was just one more restraint and she couldn't bare that yet. Tying the knots of her trousers had almost made her scream.

Keldorn, for his part, had not asked when she had refused to lace on the soft-soled boots included among the pile of clothes. The streets of the Temple District were cobblestone and well-kept, he had offered instead. If there was any place in Athkatla to indulge her inner-halfling, it was here.

Did he know?

Valla did not wonder how he had endeared himself to the others. He had all the airs of someone of noble birth, the manners, and the look, but his demeanor was kind and his personage gentle in a way that couldn't be faked. A warmth radiated from him like that of a huge, well-built fire and she found it pleasant to simply be beside him.

A paladin. A real paladin. If she could have seen him like she saw people before, he would have glimmered like the sun, just like Bjornin did when they had first met, even when he was caked with dried blood and mud and they had to drag him back to Beregost after finding him collapsed in the road.

If she had ever looked the same, it was not something that reflected in a mirror.

"Valla, you don't have to be so nervous. I won't ask."

Her gut twisted. She hadn't even realized how anxious she truly was until his words found the nerve and plucked it like the string of a harp and the quiet chant that had been repeating itself over and over again in the back of her mind suddenly had a note to sing to. _Don't ask. Pleases, don't ask. Don't, don't, don't._

She turned to look at Keldorn fully for the first time since they had left the Hall, meeting the gentle blue-gray of his eyes and finding herself unable to be anything but immediately placated by them. "But you want to," she said.

His chest rose and fell with a heavy breath in and then out. "I do," he admitted. He looked down the canal that seemed to run the entire length of the district. She followed his stare, taken briefly at how the first glimmers of sun were making the white marble of the temples and the copper of the distant minarets of Sharess' hall in particular sparkle and shine. "But it isn't my place. Falling is… personal. As personal as anything that happens between someone and their god. It isn't right for another man to pry into such things."

"But you'll punish a man for it."

It wasn't a question.

Valla had never been shy about her reasons for not joining the Radiant Heart when Bjornin had invited her and he had conceded that her points had deterred others as well. The Order was strict. They allowed very little room for error or disappointment. Promotions could be taken away as readily as they were given and traitors and Fallen found their fates at the ends of their brothers' swords.

Godly men should not be so concerned with image, she had scolded him. Where was their compassion? Why call those they fought beside brothers, if they would turn on them the moment they failed and take their heads? What a mercenary view of brotherhood. How shallow. How meaningless.

She hadn't thought her philosophy would save her life.

What good did that really do? she wondered with some measure of bitterness.

"They know where I stand on that matter," Keldorn replied, unperturbed by her chastening. "Desperate men Fall. Evil men have no perch to sink from." He looked to her. "I have never raised my hand but against those truly deserving. I will not do it for the Order either."

"What about your duty to them?" she asked. Her eyes dropped to the holy symbol that peaked out from the opened neck of his shirt, the right-handed gauntlet cast from white metal hanging from a matching chain, and she nodded to it. "You follow Torm. Should you not do what they command?"

"Duty is a complicated matter," he answered. "It's not about following orders. You must do what you know is right and put those laws and practices you know are unjust to question instead of acting with blind compliance. When you do right by yourself, your god, and your order you have done your duty, even if it's achieved with an act of disobedience."

Valla stared at him for a long moment and even then couldn't stop herself from asking: "How many times were you lashed as a squire for that philosophy?"

"It was actually one of the first things my mentor taught me," Keldorn replied and he allowed a smile at her question. He motioned for them to continue walking and they started moving again, shoulder-to-shoulder. "He was a scholar as much as a warrior. It was his belief that too many people like to simplify things to make them easier to understand. But it isn't easy to be a paladin. Our choices have an impact—they should, in fact, if we're doing our jobs right at all—and everything about what we believe should be carefully measured and thought on. As much as we should be firm in our convictions, we must be flexible in our understanding. As a follower of Torm, when we understand our duty, whatever our understanding of it might be, we can then be obedient in accordance with that duty." He looked to her. "I'm sorry. You didn't come out here to listen to an old man—"

"I was raised by monks and scholars in Candlekeep," Valla interrupted and she smiled at him. The nerves and anxiety that had twisted her insides into knots and tore her thoughts and composure to shreds and tossed them about in the chaotic winds that swirled in her head, was all suddenly put to rights listening to him. "Please, go on."

* * *

_Experimental for the sake of experimenting. Expect this to be primarily character driven so there will be chapters that focus on characters like this one focused on Keldorn (he tolerates Viconia because I always thought it OOC in the game that he wouldn't when he was so chill otherwise)._

_Suggest romance options for Valla if you are so inclined._

_Expect Edwin in the future._

_Never understood posting character stats much. Consider Valla's "haxxed". It's my theory that a bhaalspawn's physical skills ought to be naturally quite high given who their sire was, regardless of class. She also has a high intelligence for a fighter because, well, Candlekeep._

_I have not played a "vanilla" game of SOA since my first run. Since then I have modded it to the hells and back. Basically, my brain can't sort what's canon and not any more. If anything looks unfamiliar it might be from a mod or if anything looks OVERLY familiar such as from a mod you might have written, drop me a line and I will debase myself to you in gratitude._


	2. Thieves

It was the dawn that chased Valla back inside. The light burned her eyes until she had tears streaming down her cheeks and she was all but huddled into Keldorn's shoulder to hide her face until they were back at the Radiant Heart

Day sensitivity. It had rather escaped everyone's notice that their first day above ground had consisted of nothing but dark skies and rain and the smoke filled Copper Coronet.

"He could have damaged her eyes," Viconia said to Jaheira as the two poked and prodded at her after Keldorn brought her to them. "A side effect, perhaps."

Valla sat on a low divan, looking up at them as they speculated.

"The magic?"

"Maybe. Swelling or the damage it caused."

"Seems reasonable. I would say that our time underground did not help, but…"

"But none of you are experiencing similar trouble."

"Exactly. The eyes are so delicate…"

"_Xas_…"

Whistling.

Valla turned toward the sound and saw Yoshimo as he entered, wielding a needle and thread with one hand and holding the object to be darned with the other—though she couldn't quite identify it—as he approached. She smiled at him. "That's from one of Volo's compilations," she said.

He looked up and grinned. "Good ear!" he chimed. He tied the thread and then broke off with his teeth. "I hear you're suffering a bit of sun sickness."

"It's just my eyes," she replied.

"Well, I come bearing gifts that hope to help," he answered, dropping onto the divan beside her.

Viconia and Jaheira turned at this, looking almost offended at the suggestion. "Dare I ask what you think you can do, male?" the drow demanded.

He smiled cheerfully. "Very little, _Malla_, but I will try nevertheless."

With some unnecessary flair, Yoshimo shook out what Valla could see now was a short, hooded mantle cut from whisper-light wool and then he tossed it over her shoulders. It settled neatly there and with little ceremony, he reached over her head and pulled the hood up. The hood itself was deep with a beaked brim so it shaded her eyes more effectively than one simply rounded off would have. It had even been weighted with a bit of leather at the point so it would bow lower to her brow and she realized that this is what the thief had been stitching on. Clever fellow.

"I had it among my things and thought of it when our Keldorn mentioned your troubles," he explained. "And I also thought of this."

Valla squinted at what he presented, which looked like a stick of black chalk. "All right, I give up: what is it?"

"Kohl," the thief supplied helpfully. He handed it to her. "The sticks are fragile so take care. It was popular among some sailors I knew. Well, ah, I should say they were sailors of… non-military companies?" He winked at her. "I believe it's against most military dress codes."

"So, they were pirates," she said.

He gasped dramatically. "That's a prejudicial term they would take great offense to."

"I'm sure they would. So, those pirates liked it because… it made them look dashing?"

"That and, in theory, it protects the eyes from the sun's reflection on the waters," Yoshimo went on with a shrug. "I never noticed a difference, but I _happened_ to pick some up when I was at the market yesterday with our druid. Lucky you, yes?"

"Uh-huh" Valla turned the stick over in her fingers and then looked back up at the bounty hunter as she lifted an eyebrow. "I bet you get a lot of girls wearing this stuff."

"_That_ is not a part of this conversation," he answered quickly. He reached out to take the stick from her again and then with the other hand grabbed for the glass of water atop the side table nearby, which he dipped the very end of the kohl stick into. "Here, let an old hand do it first and you can try it later. I need to speak with you about something anyway. Look up."

Valla knocked her hood back and did as commanded as the thief grabbed her chin and pulled her closer. "What do you need?"

With careful, practiced ease he smudged the tapered end of the stick in short strokes across one lower lid and then the other. "I need to go to the docks," he explained. "A… misunderstanding with the Shadow Thieves has left me in a somewhat, hm, uncomfortable position with their local guild leader."

"What kind of misunderstanding?"

"A bit of business gone sour—toes stepped on," he said with a vague gesture. "It isn't important. It would simply be prudent to address this as soon as possible, but I do not want to inconvenience you."

Viconia made a noise a lot like a scoff, although there might have been a drow curse thrown in there somewhere under her breath as well. "Then why are you bringing it up?"

Yoshimo gave her a pathetically hangdog look. "I am merely briefing our leader of my circumstances so we do not run afoul of any trouble," he said. "Especially since the Shadow Thieves stand to be our benefactors." He looked to Valla beneath his lashes. "I hope our Master Bayle did not fool you with his attempts at subterfuge? There is only one organization in this city powerful enough to help us that might also stand to gain something by doing so."

Truth told, Valla had been barely functioning when the grungiest dandy of them all had set upon them in the slums. She wasn't sure where her head went when the delicate balancing act that was her new state of being was disturbed and she stumbled. It was somewhere between hyperawareness and intoxication; knowing, hearing, smelling, seeing everything, but having no control over her own reactions to it.

What she did know was that Bayle had been quite lucky that she hadn't been armed when he had stepped out of the shadows and addressed her by name, because she was a Bhaalspawn in a huge, unfamiliar city and her sister had just been taken away with a madman whose heart she wanted to tear out with her own teeth.

"I figured it was something like that," she conceded. "What do you know?"

He hummed as he dragged his callused thumbs beneath her eyes to clean the flecks that had fallen on her cheeks. "Close your eyes. Those bodies we found mutilated in the dungeon, during our escape—do you remember? I recognized the tools on their persons."

She remembered the smell and dragging a hysterical Imoen and trying to hear but everything echoed in those halls… "Were they Shadow Thieves?"

"If I had to guess," he said, making a few more strokes with a kohl against each eye. "My guess would be that they have some interest in your mage—enough to invest time and effort into finding him. There are rumors that they're at war now with another guild. It can't be a simple coincidence."

"After everything that happened up north, I don't believe much in coincidences," Valla admitted. She opened her eyes and blinked a few times. "So, what do we do?"

Yoshimo shrugged. "Keep our ears opened and our heads low and wait. The answers will come." He handed her the stick of kohl. "Keep it in a case if you can find one for it."

Valla thumbed one of her eyes self-consciously. "How's it look?"

He grinned crookedly. "Dashing."

Off to the side, Jaheira scoffed. She reached out a hand and grabbed Valla's chin, tipping it up so she could examine the girl's face. "You look like a raccoon," she said in a humorless deadpan.

"But there's nothing for it," Viconia added. "The eyes are delicate and attempts to fix them often cause more harm than good. Nevertheless, I will look into it."

"As will I," the half-elf supplied. She nodded to Yoshimo. "Thank you. This will do in the meantime."

The thief nodded. "Always happy to serve."

"Back to your problem," Valla said, nudging him. "You need to see that guild leader? Do you have a name?"

"Renal Bloodscalp."

"That… paints a very particular image."

He laughed. "Yes, I'm sure that was his intention."

"So, we just need to talk to him and then what?"

"He will likely ask something of me; a task of some sort to make up for my misstep. This is why I came to you. I could not very well go when I had already made my contract with you, you understand."

Valla smiled. "I appreciate your consideration. Well, if it's the Shadow Thieves that Bayle's working for and the Shadow Thieves that were storming Irenicus' dungeon, it might be a good idea to get as close to them as we can stand. At the very least, it can't hurt to see more of what they do here."

Yoshimo ducked his head graciously to her. "I bend to your wisdom."

"Valla, is this prudent?" Jaheira asked. "Do we really want to get more involved than necessary with the Shadow Thieves?"

"We aren't. This is just scouting. Besides, I don't think there's any reason for you or the others to come along," Valla replied. "Keldorn won't approve for obvious reasons and Minsc is too Minsc-y. Yoshimo and I will take care of it. If we can't, we'll come back for you and Vicky."

Yoshimo suddenly tapped her on the shoulder. "May I make a suggestion before we depart?" He smiled and glanced down. "Shoes, my friend. The docks won't be so kind to your bare soles."

Right. Valla nodded. After all, if she couldn't grin and bear footwear, Imoen was definitely doomed.

* * *

Renal Bloodscalp was a thief. It was obvious enough from the odd assortment of knives and bottles on his person to his cloying charisma and open-armed affability that made Valla nervous. More nervous than the mysterious bottles, really. No one tried so hard to seem harmless if they actually were actually harmless, after all. She wasn't a thief and didn't know anything about traps, but she suspected that this was something like finding a spot mysteriously covered in pine boughs and leaves in the middle of a dusty, subterranean dungeon—camouflage that became the giveaway, as it were.

But Yoshimo seemed to be handling him fine, returning his too wide smiles with too wide smiles of his own. It left Valla free to observe from just behind and to the left while juggling the appropriate amount of eye contact with the various amalgamation of thugs that Renal kept gathered around him.

Thieves had never been an organized force further north. Not even the bandits had much in common with them. Bandits worked with weaponry and were almost exclusively highway robbers and muggers. They had to be skilled woodsmen and trackers, men who knew the roads and forests, the routes people travelled, and the ways to escape when they were pursued.

These men—these Shadow Thieves. She considered the daggers and short swords on their persons, weapons meant for catching guards between their plate and chain where they were vulnerable and ripping them open. The city was their hunting ground and outside of it she imagined they would have been quite vulnerable and useless. Their kit and kindle was lock-picking and purse-grabbing and then fleeing into the shadows, down the labyrinthine alleys or to the rooftops.

"You got a problem?"

A half-drow. He stood with his shoulder against the wall to the right of everything and she had only been considering his arrangement of weapons and not his person, but she recognized the strange mixture of blood because of the murky gray of his skin that was not the true, obsidian black of a drow's while his eyes were indeed the piercing red and his hair the shocking white.

"Should I?" she asked.

He sneered at her.

Another thief behind the half-blood smiled. He was reedy and needle-nosed with dark eyes, taller than her and built for his work. "Don't mind him," he said, circling around behind Valla and squeezing her shoulders. He had the same manners that Renal and Gaelan did, all unctuous graciousness that made her uncomfortable. "He's always like that. Doesn't like outsiders."

"Fair enough."

She thought to add that _she_ didn't like them very much either, but was distracted by the definite feeling of a hand on her purse and anger sparked hot in her gut because it was just a few pitiful coppers but _Imoen_.

Valla turned as she swung her fist down, hammering the would-be pickpocket between the legs. Finishing the pivot, she caught the thief by the neck with her other hand and with it pinned him to the nearest wall, slamming him into it with such force that the wood heaved.

Needle-nose's eyes were bulged wide, shock and terror playing on his features in equal turns, because whatever he had expected it hadn't been this.

Valla seethed. This anger wasn't really hers and she ground her teeth as she fought its hold on her senses. It writhed, a mass of twisting shadows that she could feel cloying at some place inside of her, but she was not a puppet and it wouldn't ruin her as it had Sarevok—she'd _burn_ it out of her before she let it.

She released the thief and he puddled at her feet, his eyes still huge, and his knees unsupportive.

There was a tense air of danger to the room that there hadn't been before and she didn't have to turn to know that some weapons had been drawn.

"Valla?" Yoshimo's hand was on her arm and his dark eyes were full of concern and searching hers. She wondered if he could feel it like the others had come to or if it had been something else that alarmed him.

"A perfect segue! I was rather hoping for a chance to speak to your friend, Yoshimo."

They turned in tandem to look at Renal, who was vibrating with boyish delight and steepled fingertips in the midst of his swarm of prickly bodyguards. If he was bothered at all by the state of his thief on the floor, it didn't show.

Valla eyed the man. "This was about Yoshimo."

"It's all a matter of convenience really," Renal answered with a dismissive shrug. He considered her for a long moment, his eyes dragging over her from head to foot and then back up to her eyes before his serious expression broke, and he smiled once more. "Forgive me. For all I have been told, I was expecting someone…" His eyes floated to the wall, where some surface splintering had appeared along the boards where the thief had made the heaviest impact and then he finished, amused, "Taller."

"Sorry to disappoint," she said flatly, though she considered thanking him for his subtlety.

He hadn't said what he obviously _knew_.

"You haven't yet," he answered. "I have a favor to ask and then we shall see if you disappoint me."

"Do you begin all job proposals with poorly veiled threats?"

Renal shrugged. "Most. It helps maintain a certain order to things, I think. So, to the details: one of my guild houses to the south is ran by a rather ambitious fellow named Mae'var. He's a good thief, but I've never liked him. Now I know why."

* * *

If Renal was off-putting because of his lavish charisma and charm, then Mae'var sat somewhere on the other end of the spectrum and was off-putting because he was just inside-out insane. Even Yoshimo, who was all cool professionalism in the face of his fellow thieves in these their dens, seemed disturbed by the sheer variety of torture devices their newly acquired target had at his disposal.

Renal wasn't subtle, but he was at least more subtle than _this_, which at least spoke well of his sense of taste and decorum if nothing else.

"Shall I throw you on the rack and see what secrets spill out? Heh. Scared you, did I?"

Even so, Valla wasn't much moved. It was either because her head still felt strange from the anger that had come over her before and she was now lost in a dizzying, apathetic haze or because nothing could be any more disturbing than the people and parts of people she had seen beneath the Promenade, who had been living, dead, and caught in that strange and merciless state of in-between, all of them entombed just the same in their glass coffins.

Mae'var noticed her. He drew close and eyed her from head to toe, near enough that she could smell the strange combination of smoke and flowers on him. "You don't look like a thief."

"Do you think that'll contribute to or take away from my success in the field?"

He sneered. Renal hadn't really been a handsome man, but his manners, however calculated and transparent, were enough to endear one away from his skin, left pocked from an unkind childhood disease, and the broken turns his nose took on its way down his face. Mae'var was sleek and swarthy and all the other pretty words Volo liked to describe thieves with, but he hissed his s's and his features were those of a spoiled child's, all up-turned and pinched.

As much as she didn't trust Renal, Valla decided that she didn't _like_ Mae'var.

"I don't have time to pay personal attention to every new hand Renal feels like throwing at me. You should consider yourself fortunate for that," Mae'var concluded after a long moment. "I have a man in-house that needs some men for a job, though. His name's Edwin—a damn fine wizard, but he likes his luxuries and prefers not to dirty his own hands with too much physical labor. You'll find him upstairs. _Go_."

* * *

Yoshimo caught the hem of Valla's mantle between his fingers and gave it a gentle tug as he dogged her up another flight of stairs. "You seem bothered," he said.

Valla glanced back at him. "No, it's not that," she murmured, patting his hand that was gripping the rail. They were nearing the third floor landing, their steps slower as they spoke. "I just… hells, I know that name…"

"Which name?"

"You must be my new underlings—_hm, yes, I see Mae'var understood I wasn't exaggerating when I explained I needed dumb muscle._ My name is Edwin Odesseiron. If that proves too syllabically intensive for you, you may simply call me 'Sir'."

Thinking, sometimes, with her mind the way it was now, felt like slogging through hip-deep mud.

But Valla was never going to forget that particular shade of violent, royal red or the level of sanctimonious arrogance that came attached to it in her memory.

Edwin was basically the same as her foggy memory painted him, tall and long-limbed in his robes, his angular face and dark hair hidden deep in his cowl. His fingers were not laid with jewels as she remembered, though, but the amulet around his neck that was his House's birthright remained. He had described how it'd have to be pried from the bare phalanges of his skeleton's grasp before he'd part with it. It had been very vivid.

She was almost giddy.

To say that she and Imoen had had fun at the expense of the terrible and fearsome Red Wizard their company had acquired along the road to the mines was something of an understatement. It had, in fact, been a riot. It had even been kind of fun keeping a microcosmic Thay-Rashemen border war from breaking loose. To Dynaheir it had been an academic opportunity to examine an enemy in a neutral environment (from behind the safety of Minsc's bulk if necessary). To Edwin, with some nudging and manipulation she had learned from Gorion over their years of negotiating chores, it had become an opportunity to show-off Thay's superiority—as most opportunities were.

Witch-Mage rivalries were fun to watch, especially when the results only involved fireworks and the creative deaths of bandits who deserved it anyway.

Of course, Edwin assured them that they were all going to die while they slept some night, but it never came. He griped, he moaned, he fussed, but that fireball meant to end them had never manifested.

But he had _left_.

The memory surfaced, crisp and vibrant, and without thinking Valla pulled off her shoe and threw it at him.

Edwin, in a show of dexterity she would have never credited him with otherwise, managed to avoid the hit, but the movement knocked his cowl back. He straightened, flailing his arms to the side in indignation, a flurry of red silk and elaborate gold trim, all of his pomp and dignity gone at once. "What in the name of all the Zulkirs—?" His voice closed in on the edge of breaking as it often did when he was excited.

She didn't let him finish.

"You left!" she scolded. "You followed us into the damned, forgotten Undercity of Baldur's Arse filled with rotting, reanimated corpses to fight and kill my mad brother in the temple of a dead god without batting an eyelash, but you disappeared the second you had to show your face in the daylight again, you scarlet egomaniac!"

Edwin paused mid-outrage and stared at her, his expression slackened somewhat with genuine surprise. "Valla?"

Valla anger suddenly came up short. No, she supposed she wasn't very recognizable in this condition was she? Viconia had only known her in the Government Square because she was attuned to the Taint on a spiritual level after their extensive time together. She had rather forgotten all of that. Hm. She was rather lucky he hadn't responded to that first shoe with a spell of some sort. Then again, that was typical Edwin. Why answer with force when he could engage one of his most favorite of all things in the realms? His own voice. Magic didn't even much compare to that.

Gods, it was good to _remember_ something so clearly, even if it was just his pompous snake-face.

Her thoughts were broken into by the sound of the wizard, who had started to howl with laughter.

With her second throw, her other shoe did hit him.

He towered over her as he rubbed his offended skull and Valla gathered up her estranged footwear. "Dare I ask I how this came on? How _did_ our glorious Paladin fall from her high place?" He leaned a little as if to confirm a suspicion and then reached to pluck back her hood. "And what happened to your hair? Thayan style does not suit you."

She eyed him. "Mad mage, extensive torture, pain you can't imagine, fiddling with my memory; that sort of thing. The hair was lost as a result of too much blood and burnt bits. I had Jaheira cut it."

"I can't tell if you're being facetious, your life is one insane leap to another—_honestly, some things never change with this girl_."

Valla raised a hand and lifted the hem of her vest to better expose her stomach and the spider-webbing networks of interconnecting white scars that worked thickly across the flesh there. "Who would be facetious about that kind of thing?" she muttered distractedly as she slid one shoe back on.

"Fair enough. I suppose I ought to believe anything at this point where it concerns you," he muttered. He examined the scars a moment longer and then curled his nose. "Why would you let _that_ happen?"

With the other shoe still at hand, Valla lifted it like a weapon. "Honest to the gods, wizard!"

"If you hit me again, I'll curse you, girl!"

She huffed at him impotently and lowered her shoe. "So, if we're going to speak of falling from high places," she grumbled, dragging her eyes over him as she slipped her other shoe back on and then raised her unarmed hands to placate him. "Why are you here and looking so destitute?"

Edwin huffed and straightened his cowl. "I am _hardly_ dest—"

"Oh? And which ring ought I kiss—oh, what's this?" She reached for one of his hands and held it up by a fingertip as if it were a specimen for study she didn't exactly want to touch. "I don't see any. Pawned them all have you? I presume that was before your posting here. I would think the Shadow Thieves a little beneath you, though—a grubby little guild-house like this, especially. And run by a snake like Mae'var? How do you like the way he slurps your name? I can almost hear it: _Od-ess-ss-iron._"

He visibly flinched and then scowled. "What do you want, woman?"

Valla huffed. "Imoen was taken by the Cowled Ones, that mage is going to pop back up again like a bad nightmare, and I'm in a tight spot, but if my life has taught me anything, the walls are just going to start closing in from here. So, I'm going to need a spell-caster. I can either hire someone who's cut-rate but with morals and tact, someone even raised by actual people with hearts and souls, or I can hire someone magnificent with the personality of a salted eel. Like you."

Edwin looked, for a moment, quite pleased and as if he was ready to argue only her last point, but then he stomped his foot. "No, damn it! This once I am meant to be giving the orders! You're meant to be _my_ underlings, that is why you are here, no?"

"For the time being."

"Well, yes, until your inevitable betrayal."

"Hm?" Valla exchanged a look with Yoshimo, whose expression of utmost innocence was very impressive. As had been his patience through this comedy of errors that was this reunion. "I have no idea what you mean."

Edwin rolled his eyes in that way that made them look like they were about to take a journey outside of his skull and across the planked floors. "Your façade of wilderness manners suits your upbringing, but we travelled together extensively and loathed though I am to admit it—_like stabbing myself in the thigh_—you simply do not work for people like Mae'var. It is beneath you, as it is me—_just not as far_."

She waved a hand. "Oh, fine. Bloodscalp wants us to find out who Mae'var is consorting with behind his back. Apparently thieves only approve of certain kinds of backstabbing."

"Hm, yes, I was wondering when he would get his. Thieves can't be said to have much in the way of anything else to their advantage, but their justice does tend to be quite timely." He pulled at one of the long, braided ends of his mustache as if making a difficult decision. "I need my business attended first and then I will consider lowering myself to aiding your cause again. You should pity me, somewhat, however, as the Cowled Ones are giving me trouble as well."

She snorted. "Yes, I see. Except Imoen is Imoen and you're from a power-hungry Magocracy headed by your Zulkirs and a _lich_ of all worldly and otherworldly creatures and you embrace some if not all of the crazy ideals you've been instilled with. You can see where my heart fails to bleed over your condition."

Edwin's brows pinched and he pulled an expression very close to a pout. "Then find a vein and tap it, because I won't be of any use to you if they take me away to whatever cave it is they dwell in as well. Kill this thorn in my side and I will help you locate your wayward lamb _and_ snuff this mage of yours."

* * *

One less Cowled Wizard in the world, a very dead Mae'var, and a giddy Renal made the day a rather accomplished one overall, Valla thought.

She had even managed to keep Edwin from jumping into the canals when he realized that the group had set up base at the Headquarters of the Radiant Heart, though she still had to all-but drag him through the main hall to the guest quarters their group had taken occupancy in.

"And the errant wizard returns. Valla, you surfacers have an interesting proverb about laying down with dogs, do you not?"

Edwin sniffed at Viconia's casual dismissal as the drow passed them on her way through the small common area that connected the guest rooms. "My curiosity begs that I ask: from what heretics, fanatics, or other manner of weirdo attempting to relieve her lovely head from her delightful body did you rescue her this time?" he rebutted.

"_Vith'ir_," the priestess spat at him, but it was with only a fraction of the contempt she reserved for her real enemies. She looked then to Valla and grabbed her chin, tilting her head back and then from one side to the other, examining something that eluded the grasp of those present. "The sun, how do you fair in it now?"

"Not great," Valla admitted. "But the hood makes it bearable and I _think_ the kohl works? Thank you, by the way, Yoshimo."

The thief, who was on his way to claim a sofa by the windows, turned to bow to her deeply, before flopping backward into the cushions. "I'm always happy to serve." He tugged his hood lower to hide his eyes. "But for now a nap, if my employer wills it?"

She smiled. "I think you've done more than your share of work today," she agreed.

Yoshimo saluted her lazily in thanks and then toed off his boots.

Behind her, Edwin cleared his throat loudly and meaningfully.

Valla glanced back at him. "Why do you need me to pat you on the back? You'll just say I'm not doing it right anyway."

He scowled moodily down at her. "_Ungrateful harpy. _I assume there's a bed available somewhere?"

"Pick an unoccupied room, there ought to be one left." She reached out to grab the back of his robes before he could depart and nearly toppled him over backwards to readdress him as she added, "And _do not_ mention anything about Dynaheir to Minsc. I swear, Edwin, if push comes to punch I'm not going to stop him from ripping off your arms."

He swatted her hand away and straightened his robes. "What? Would I ever do something so low, so distasteful—?"

"Yes. So I want you to dig down to the bottom of that shriveled, black lump you call a heart, scrape up something resembling human decency and either keep your peace or offer your sincere condolences. The third option involves letting Viconia get creative with what she has available."

Viconia released a gusty sigh from the other side of the room where she was straightening some things on a table she and Jaheira had laid with alchemical supplies. "The wizard almost promised to misstep and with no tentacle rods available to amuse…"

With that Valla released Edwin. "I'm going to see what I can do about finding a real bath now."

"_Don't hesitate to drown yourself."_

"What was that, Edwin?"

"Nothing, woman! Cease your prattle and leave!"

* * *

Edwin brings out nothing but the best in everyone as always.

Review if you are so inclined. I'd be much obliged.


	3. Blood

Taking dinner in the Hall with the initiate squires and the handful of paladins present rather than away on assignments was always a tense affair, but the atmosphere was especially heavy that night.

Viconia had, this once, opted to join them and settled across from Jaheira at the end of the table where they could insult each other, bicker, and then nitpick at everyone else without disturbing the table at large.

Edwin and Valla argued over the coin she wouldn't spare him to dine elsewhere, which was like slipping into an old, comfortable sweater. At last, he relented and settled down in the mess in his shirtsleeves and trousers alone. All the while, he muttered darkly under his breath.

"Redirect your rodent's eyes, simple one."

Minsc considered the Thayan. Even without plate mail and seated, the man towered at the table. Boo, gleaming butterscotch and freshly brushed, was observing the wizard from the center of the table with the alarming and eerie awareness that came frequently upon him and infrequently upon his charge. "I do not know why Valla brings along one whose evil scent wafts from them as yours does, wizard," the ranger said.

Edwin's fingers were steepled in front of him, his forehead resting against his joined fingertips. "I would say that it is because she is a woman of refined tastes, but then there would be no accounting for your presence. Also, what you smell is _soap_. I recommend you look into its usage. Ask your rat if the concept confuses you."

"_Boys_."

Valla appeared. She was wearing a dress, which was sleeveless and undecorated but for its deep hood that she wore up and perched in such a way as to cover her scalp but not hide her face. It was cut from plain linen and it swirled like a riptide about her feet as she walked with the long, purposeful strides of a fighter and not a lady. Her leather weapons-belt was slung around her hips with just a dagger present and when she was near the scent of fragrant oils followed her.

"No arguing at the table. We're guests here, so try to keep it civil." With that, Valla scooped Boo off the table and placed him in the cradle of Minsc's tree trunk of a neck and his massive shoulder. "Apologies, Boo, the masses here are ignorant to the glories of your kind. All they'll see is hamster feet on their table."

Minsc covered the hamster gently with one hand and stroked his fur. "He understands and thanks you for correcting his poor manners. His zealousness got the better of him."

Edwin made a sound as if someone were choking him. "Must you humor the idiot?" he grumbled as Valla took the seat beside him.

"Fair is fair," she said, shaking out a napkin and laying it across her lap. "I humor you, don't I? And take your elbows off the table. I thought you were raised in a noble house?"

The wizard's dark muttering resumed, this time in Thayan, in which she nor anyone else present was fluent. She patted him on the knee dismissively and then smiled at Yoshimo as the thief joined the table at last and took a seat on her other side. She reached out to pluck meaningfully at the rough cotton of the shirt he wore, which folded in the front and tied at the waist with a dark sash. The sleeves were wider and uncuffed and the faded embroidery near his collar was an unfamiliar pattern to her. "From home?" she asked.

"One of the few such things I still own," he said cheerfully. "I'm afraid most of my garments from home haven't survived my journeys—or, hm, my work?" He grinned, but then straightened his shirt self-consciously. "Still, it feels strange to be anywhere without armor—it's not good practice for a man in my trade—but I understand this is the custom in this land."

"I think we're safe enough in here."

"One would like to think such a thing, yes."

Valla smiled at that, but her attention was drawn from him to another once more. "I was wondering if you would join us. I haven't seen you."

Bjornin had greeted Minsc with a friendly hand upon his shoulder before his attention turned to the young woman and his expression brightened considerably. "So, you know me now? You are looking in far better health than when I left you." He leaned across the table to embrace her with one arm and bestow a kiss her upon the cheek. "I feared the worst for you."

"No, no need. Jaheira and Viconia are the very best. They could nag a lich back to life."

The paladin smirked at her. "Fitting. Your life is one that could send the most stalwart hearts to early graves for worry of you."

She laughed and ignored the pang that lanced through her, his words unknowingly sharpened with an edge that cut into a spot of her that had never healed.

Early graves.

There had been too many of those already and she their digger if only by the laws of cause and effect.

She shook away the thoughts. That outing earlier with Yoshimo, a push closer to their goal no matter how incremental, and then time alone to bathe and attend her new armor had been the closest thing to the old "routine" that she had known in what felt like eons. It had cleared her mind considerably and chased away the shadows and bone hands that clawed and poked.

For the night, she wouldn't let them in again.

But as they took their seats, Bjornin across from her, the weighted atmosphere in the hall pressed in.

If the others noticed, they said nothing.

Servants and the very youngest initiates—squires no older than twelve—brought the food from the kitchens to place upon the tables. The boys skittered about, trying to avoid knocking elbows with those seated as they followed the instructions dictated by the kitchen maids.

Valla observed quickly how they avoided her at all costs. It was not a subtle thing.

Minsc took trays from them to help slide them into place and Bjornin asked how their studies went as they passed and darted around. Jaheira straightened collars and scolded messy hair and ponytails that were too long. Yoshimo corrected the positioning of one boy's dagger. It wasn't even a distance they afforded Viconia, who murmured at them in Drow and chuckled in a low, smoky tone when they fidgeted nervously under her jewel-colored eyes.

So, in the name of gathering intelligence, Valla reached out as one rail-thin boy edged deliberately around the opposite side of Yoshimo to place a tray of bread, and touched her hand to his wrist.

The boy dropped the whole tray as if he had been scalded, scattering the buns onto the tabletop, and jumped back from the table with his wide, terrified eyes focused solely on her. It was as if he expected her skin to melt away and reveal a lich or a basilisk beneath…

"Collins!" Bjornin barked with surprise and confusion.

Valla watched the child, though he looked older than the others, bemused. "It's not catching, you know," she said.

He gaped at her for a second longer and then turned and darted off.

Valla ignored the weight of the entire mess' staring as she tossed the rolls back upon the platter, taking the last one for herself and tearing a piece off to eat.

"Subtle like Dwarven Warhammers—_what else is to be expected?_" Edwin sniffed.

"Edwin," Jaheira warned. "Silence."

"I don't know what got into the lad," Bjornin said, puzzled. "Valla—"

"I think I need to talk to the Prelate," she cut in and she looked up at him. "Where is he at this hour?"

The paladin's brows lifted, mildly taken aback. "He takes his meals in his office."

"Is everything all right here?"

Valla looked over her shoulder to address Keldorn as his hand came to rest upon her back just as she got to her feet. "It's nothing, Keldorn."

"Valla." Jaheira was standing as well "Are you certain—?"

"Eat," the girl said, waving the druid off. "I'll take care of this."

* * *

"Am I welcomed here or not?"

The Prelate looked up from his work just as the door closed, punctuating the question.

"Valla!"

"Stay out of this, Bjornin. You too, Keldorn."

Wessalen looked between the two senior members—Bjornin immediately beside her and Keldorn behind them near the doors and observing—and then to the young woman between them.

The smell of flowers followed her movements, overpowered by her Fall, which cloyed like a mourner's cloak, so thick in the air he could nearly taste its sickly, metallic bitterness upon his tongue. Before being cast down, she must have been, he thought, quite a wonder. Falls seemed to come on proportionate to the paladin's previous standing with their god and for hers to be such a palpable force she must have been something unique indeed.

Very unique.

His musings turned dark and he considered her further.

Her party cloistered themselves in the quarters afforded by the Heart's charity and he had learned quickly that they turned away servants except to take the linens—a fact mentioned offhanded by the Head of Staff to him when the portly mother of fourteen first reported to him how they had settled. It hadn't seemed odd at first, but in the days that followed it added up with everything else.

They did not speak to anyone within the Order that was not Bjornin or Keldorn.

Healing services were never requested.

Meal times were spent in a tightly knitted group that, while friendly and happy to engage the initiates, priests, and members in lively conversation, deflected questions regarding their travels in along the Sword Coast.

And now Wessalen understood why.

It was the Harper's doing, he had little doubt. The control of information and how it flowed was something Harpers excelled at.

"I sent a letter north to Baldur's Gate to confirm your identities. Rather, a few reports had surfaced of your group going missing and I thought to inform the interested parties in the Gate that you had been located—harmed, but that the majority of your group was alive and recovering. I also requested details of your exploits. We have only heard fragmented stories here—bard songs, tavern tales, and the like." He paused a moment and then pressed on when she did not react. "To my surprise, I received a direct answer from Duke Eltan himself."

Valla's attention seemed to fade for a moment and he wondered what memories surfaced at the mention of the faraway noble.

"His reply was extensive. He spoke of you with excessive fondness."

"We saved his life," she answered with blunt matter-of-factness.

Wessalen regarded her for a few long moments in the tense silence that followed and he _wondered_.

She had been rousted from a simple, safe upbringing with the murder of her Harper warden, chased the length and breadth of the Sword Coast by people baying for her blood, dragged into conflicts far beyond her ken in a simple search for reason, and it had all nearly ended at the point of a warmonger's sword, with false accusations painting her a traitorous upstart to an ungrateful and easily deceived public.

And yet, even now with the fresh marks of another madman's touch upon her flesh and mind, she pressed the advance.

He had known men—great men, men who had been favored thrice over by the gods—who had been felled by less.

"Your companions are unique."

"Yes."

"The Thayan and the drow, do you trust them?"

"Yes."

"That isn't wise."

"I've been told as much in the past and they have had their chances to betray me. I'll give them each a few more."

He wasn't sure if her youthful stubbornness was to be damned or her steadfast loyalty praised, but it hardly mattered because a greater problem pressed upon them like a stone giant's fist and suffocated further, needless debate.

"His lordship mentioned something else. He seemed reticent to speak of it, but I do not think he wanted rumors to reach us first…"

"You need not speak so delicately. There are no pretty words for it, so the plainest will do." Valla drew her hands into fists at her sides and a muscle clenched in her jaw. "You must know that during Godswar the Dead Three were slain, but that Bhaal was somehow forewarned of his demise and left behind a legacy of an untold number of children embedded with his essence. I'm one of them."

Wessalen took a sharp breath and something new and vile tickled his palate. It was the smell of war and in his mind he saw the carnage—corpse rot, ichor, and blood pooling like rainwater in puddles and ditches—and in just the same moment it was gone. But, it had touched him, whatever it was. It had reached out with a hand of skeletal fingers and flesh of shadows and hollowed out a tiny part of him to fill with a fear as cold as steel. Reflexively, he fisted a hand around the holy symbol at his neck and pressed it to his chest.

Bjornin grabbed Valla by the shoulders and turned her about to face him. "How long have you carried this secret?" he asked.

"The very last time I returned to Candlekeep, I revisited the rooms I shared with my father. I went through his papers and found a letter that he had written and left behind for me in case something happened." She was speaking, but her eyes were far away. "I have no reason to doubt its genuineness. It explains too much…"

The paladin shook his head. "I thought you seemed… different the last time we met, but I thought it was your situation then. You were on the run and had just barely escaped prosecution…"

The fog cleared from the girl's eyes and she suddenly stepped back from the older man and looked again to Wessalen. "If I'm not welcomed here, say it," she demanded. "I've heard it before. I prefer directness to whispers and frightened squires acting as if I am some sort of plague."

The Prelate thought of the chill he still felt in that space that seemed to touch his very core and he wondered if her battered mental state was not all the work of her wanted mage, but also of too many nights spent locked in contest with that _thing_—how could one not be at battle with such a force inside of them?

_Of_ them?

He had heard stories of Children who lived average lives as farmers and milkmaids. And then there were others, who were driven utterly mad with the lust to kill. He knew that the Order could not come to a consensus on the matter of the Children because no one could agree and even if they could it wasn't right to interfere with the lives of so many perfectly innocent individuals anyway. He knew that the Godswar had nearly torn the world they stood upon to shreds and that the Children were a very real reminder of a time of horrors that was still too fresh in the minds of too many.

And further still, he wondered.

What was it to be a Bhaalspawn? Damned at birth by blood and then damned again by prophecy.

He wondered if it weighed as heavily upon her as it would on him.

"If they've heard anything, it hasn't been from this office," Wessalen said. "I haven't discussed this aloud until this very moment. We do, however, have soldiers, initiates, and refugees that have come from Nashkel after the tensions died down. Any number of rumors could have reached ears here, especially among the young ones." He drew a measured breath. "I do not know whether to fear you or fear for you, Valla, but I know that whatever path lies ahead of you, it will be dangerous enough without your friends and enemies making themselves indistinguishable. I have yet to see evidence that suggests that your blood influences you in a negative fashion and you will be welcomed here as long as that remains true."

She stared at him, surprise evident in her topaz-colored eyes. "I Fell," she said sharply.

Her meaning was clear. Did he not think her blood responsible for leading her astray?

"Obviously, you also once felt the Call," he answered

This was not the answer she had expected of him and for a few, long moments she was stunned into quiet. Finally, she nodded. "Thank you for your time, Prelate."

With that, she turned and departed.

* * *

It all added up.

Ulraunt's unswerving hatred.

Gorion's steadfast refusal to let her beyond the gates.

The Harpers at her every turn, the visions that plagued her nights, the hunters that dogged her steps—

She should have cut _Koveras_ down where he stood when his story had failed to make sense and he had become so hostile to her refusal. But she hadn't had she? And maybe she hadn't bought his act, but she hadn't put it together quickly enough either.

She hoped he was having a good laugh on his way back to the Gate.

Because Koveras, reversed, was Sarevok.

The mad audacity was almost admirable.

Valla had the letter—her father's words to her from beyond the grave—clutched in her hand, her fist pressed to her mouth as the storm roiled in her mind and maybe the only thing stopping her from falling to the side and screaming until she was hoarse.

"Valla." Khalid was crouched in front of her, his beautiful, stag brown eyes sharp and focused and his stammer gone in the face of mounting danger. "Valla, we need you here with us." His hand took hers gently, his mailed fingers closing around hers with tenderness she had come to expect and appreciate from him. "Everything else we can sort out later, but right now we need you here. We need a way out."

"I thought you were a thief!"

Khalid cringed when the others' voices broke in.

"Hey! Don't throw stones, _wizard_. I don't see you doing anything to _help_."

"Silence, you ignorant child. The wards are too powerful and should an attempt at force fail you may no longer have tumblers to fiddle with! That is if the door does not simply throw the spell back in our faces!"

"Dyna, what about you? Got anything up your sleeves that this blowhard doesn't?"

"You—!"

"No, Imoen. Edwin is quite correct. The wards are much too strong to undo this lock with magic. I don't even think Minsc could force the lock with sheer strength."

"We-ell, perhaps then Boo—"

"I am afraid not even Boo can help us, Minsc." A dark, fine-boned hand tattooed along the length of its ring and middle fingers traced the engravings that spiraled around the shaft of one of the iron bars that made the walls of their cell. Dynaheir almost appeared to float in her airy robes that swathed her willowy frame. "This is very old magic and very well set. Your scholars and monks are a good bit more dangerous than they appear if this is their work."

"Thank you, young one."

"Tethoril!" Imoen, all vibrant hair and frayed hems, threw herself against the bars with a joyful smile. "Ulraunt's got it in for us, but _you'll_ listen! We didn't have anything to do with—"

The man reached a hand through the bars to tweak the thief's chin with a fatherly fondness. His warm eyes, set into his kind face lined with many years of age and half-shrouded by his long beard, sparkled. "So glad as I am to see you, dear Imoen, I must speak with your sister now. Valla, you are a woman grown and a paladin besides. Do not sulk in the corner. Stand. Your prey grows more distant by the minute so we have just a moment to discuss what you have learned today."

Valla looked up to address the man who was observing her from within the deep recesses of his cowl. Looking away, she got to her feet. "Who else knew?" she asked as she came to the bars and laid her hand upon them.

Tethoril drew a breath. "Most everyone that lived within these walls. The Watchers did not, excepting the Warden, but the sages and the monks here, Winthrop, and Ulraunt and myself, of course…" He shook his head. "I argued with your father on many occasions. I thought that you should know, so that you might prepare yourself, but he believed that it would only make you vulnerable. He loved you so and thought… well, I believe he thought he could protect you from your blood. At least, he was willing to devote his life to the attempt."

She squeezed the bar until her arm shook with the force. Her face felt hot and her eyes stung. "It was all a lie then," she concluded at last. "My whole life? This wasn't my home, it was just my cage and you were my keepers—"

"_Stop_." An ancient hand fell upon hers and she looked up immediately into the cleric's gentle eyes. His thumb stroked her knuckles, encouraging her to loosen her grip, gentling the rage that built within her. The dim light of the barracks gleamed off the plates of her scratched and dented armor, and turned her rust-colored hair, loose and tangled around her shoulders, to fire. "Ulraunt, I'm sorry to say, was never able to see past your heritage, but among the rest of us, you softened hearts that had become too hard in their isolation, became the pupil many here would never take when they were young, and were to others the child that they never had a chance to rear." His hand left hers and reached through the bars to touch her face, lifting her chin higher and then sweeping her hair back from her eyes. "You were our masterwork in every way; our labor of love. Remember these things when the shadows pull at you and the lies in your blood begin to spin their webs; that Gorion loved you with his dying breath and that you are loved even still. Never let anything tell you otherwise."

* * *

Those times seemed so distant. When Valla tried to call upon the details—the lines of Tethoril's face or the smell of hers and Gorion's old rooms—things blurred together until the they were lost, like her memories were painted with watercolor.

But all of the words and voices were etched in her memory with crystal clarity.

She immersed herself in these thoughts as she sat in the Headquarter's prayer gardens, beneath its single weeping willow and among the blankets of spring wild flowers. There were stone paths between each bed and winding its way through the length of the garden was a shallow channel that poured into a small pond of four, golden fish.

From within the Hall, she could hear the vespers beginning, which echoed like heavenly choir into the garden through opened windows. In the distance, the more mournful notes of Lathander's evening bells signaled the sunset.

"I hope you don't mind an old man intruding on you."

Valla looked up at the voice. Bjornin was watching her with a gentle but unreadable expression, holding aside the long tendrils of the willow boughs with one hand as if holding aside a curtain.

"I don't see this old man you speak of, but you're more than welcomed to join me."

He laughed at this and then drew close enough to settle himself onto the stone bench beside her. He moved with more grace than one might ever credit a fighting man. If she had to guess, he had not been noble-born like Keldorn and wore his station with more common manners and spoke in a more simple, rough-hewn way, but there was charm had even there. "I wondered what it was when I first met you," he began, his elbows upon his knees and his head bowed. "I'm glad to know now. There should not be such secrets between friends."

His approach was, if nothing else, admirable. Did she not tell Wessalen herself that she preferred directness? "Does it not bother you?" she asked.

The man sighed as he laid a callused hand upon her knee. "I would be lying if I said it did not," he admitted. Then he looked to her and offered a tired smile. "But it changes nothing. I will pray for you as much as ever, to be sure, but you are Valla to me and that will remain."

Valla smiled back and laid her hand upon his. "Thank you."

Bjornin nodded, however, it was clear enough that something more was troubling him and after a moment longer he pressed on: "Can you feel it?"

"Sometimes more than others," she replied. "I can… call on it. For strength, to heal minor wounds, or to draw out toxins…" She turned a palm out and examined it, searching it for a mark or a sign or any other outward abnormality that might give her inheritance away. It was not the first time. "I dream too."

"What are the dreams about?"

"Restless souls, Infernal chants, the smell of rotting flesh and sickness, rivers of blood…" She followed the lines of her palm with her eyes. "Sometimes they actually have some sense of cohesion, but I can never make sense of them until afterward. I killed a man in the depths of the Nashkel mines—a conspirator with the Iron Throne and the one responsible for poisoning the ore—and I saw his spirit in a dream afterward. But I don't know any more if it was just a dream."

They had met on the meandering road to Beregost.

That is, she and Imoen had just barely spotted his prone body lying face-down in the mud on the lee side of a slope and had started to rather shamelessly contemplate looting his "remains" for gold despite Khalid's protests and her own moral compunctions. But, they were lost and hunting had been very lean since the gibberlings, hobgoblins, and kobolds about scared off every deer, rabbit, and fowl.

That was when Jaheira had poked him and he had made a sound half-way between a grunt and a gurgle announcing his not-quite state of deadness.

Upon this discovery, the plan changed accordingly.

The druid had administered some of her not-so tender roadside care to his wounds and with a makeshift litter they managed to reorient themselves to the road and begin their long trek to the Jovial Jester.

Even during all of that, when he had been laid-up, helpless, and utterly dependent upon virtual strangers for his basic safety, Valla had never known Bjornin to show fear.

However, looking into his eyes in that moment, she saw it. Seeing the feelings playing out in a friend's eyes, made it clearer to her then what the Prelate had meant when he had spoken of not knowing whether to fear her or to fear for her.

"Valla…" Bjornin's fingers twitched against her knee, squeezing and letting go. "Your blood… did you Fall because…?"

He'd know immediately if she was lying, but what good would the truth do? Strike another blow against the fragile faith one of her few allies had in her? Confirm how little control she really had these days?

But lying was just another toehold the shadows could claim, wasn't it?

Thankfully, she didn't have to decide.

Hysterical, frantic screaming from within the sanctum shattered the delicate peace of their hideaway.

"_Please, she needs a cleric! Someone help! She was attacked by a vampire_!"

* * *

I think too many like to take the "no one REALLY loved me in Candlekeep" route too often as an "emergency angst route"

So here's flashback!Tethoril

I like Paladins and I find them overplayed as the two dimensional "hur hur" church-going close-minded hillbilly fanatics too often because everyone is overly enamored with the idea of "dark and gritty" and we can't possibly have a REAL HERO

Except Captain America would totally be a paladin and he's pretty damn cool


	4. Bite

The woman was more of a girl.

She was barely nineteen and blonde and fair and beautiful.

Valla watched the clerics pour magic into her as she bled on the sanctum floor at Tyr's feet. The air hummed with the power.

Her brother was a puddle of weak knees and sweat somewhere at the entry, the front of his fine, Amnish attire soaked through with his sibling's lifeblood. Another cleric attended him as he gibbered to himself, his hands clutching at the floor as he shook his head. "I couldn't stop it—couldn't see—not a sound—came from above—"

Her neck was a mess—absolutely ravaged, as if by a wild animal. Valla had seen the bodies of bandits unfortunate enough to meet their ends in the jaws of nature and knew well enough that the clerics' efforts were worthless.

She didn't stay to watch her suspicions be confirmed.

The library was on the other side of the Hall. Two stories of bookshelves filled to bursting with books. The topics were, of course, geared to the tastes of the members of the Order—scholarly works on religion and history, and some of ecology, geography, magic, and other natural studies—but there were a handful of dusty shelves that hosted some novelties.

"You did not return to dinner. I half-expected that you had been carted off to be beheaded. How disappointing."

"Edwin, if you're going to be mean, try to sound sincere about it. Otherwise, I might get it in my head that you rather like me."

The wizard was sprawled lazily against one arm of the settee in front of the library's enormous fireplace with his spellbook opened across his lap and a quill in hand. His feet were propped on the low table in front of him beside an opened bottle and half-filled glass of wine.

"So, after that urchin's display at the table I would think it safe to assume that they know what you are," he drawled. "That _was_ what you stormed off to speak with the Prelate about, no?"

Valla tapped her nose as she drew closer. "Point to you, my lord."

He hummed. "And how is it that we have not been removed from the premises? Or have we and they are giving us an unusual grace period to pack?"

"The Prelate wrote to the powers that be in the Gate and Duke Eltan vouched for my trustworthiness, blood or no blood." She dropped onto the other end of the couch and toed off her slippers before pulling her feet up onto the cushion with her and turning to face Edwin, letting her head come to rest against the cushioned back. "Despite what you think, being a hero comes with perks."

Edwin snorted in a decidedly undignified manner. "Scads of clinging beggars, thankless, back-breaking work, and, apparently, sessions of mind-altering, body-scarring torture—which I had never counted among hero work's deficiencies in the past but you have shown me the error of my ways with your latest misadventures in my absence." He spared her a narrow, sideways look. "How… how are you healing, by the way?"

Valla traced the vine-work of scars that ran along the inside of her left forearm and shrugged. "I'm going out in the yard tomorrow," she said. "We'll see then if I'm good to actually swing a sword again."

"And the disappearing and reappearing trick your mind has been doing…?"

"Some days it's better than others." She smiled at him. "Are you worried about me, Edwin?"

"Nothing of the sort," he sniffed. He leaned forward to tip more wine into his glass and then, to her surprise, offered it to her. "I just like to be informed. And there are other concerns. For example, if your mind fails in the midst of combat, this group will be left without leadership and I will have to be prepared to step up in such an instance."

Valla laughed. The wine was sweet and probably something he had filched from under the noses of the kitchen staff. She was grateful for it, though. She hadn't had good wine in, how long? It was a reminder of better times. Times, in fact, where they had shared like this—him, her, and Dynaheir. She had never understood much about magical theory, but listening to them always made her feel close to home. "You couldn't lead a rat to cheese, Edwin. Although, I would like to watch you try to keep this motley little crew from sacrificing each other in combat."

At this, even Edwin cracked a faint smile. "I admit, I never figured out how you did it," he said. "Your Harper and priestess have even bonded over their mutual disapproval of everyone, including each other."

"You even liked Dynaheir," she hedged, offering the glass back to him.

He eyed her for a moment and then looked away. "I… respected the witch," he admitted tentatively. "I have never had a truly worthy rival and she was at least as learned as I was, despite her upbringing. Maybe her intelligence was more impressive because of it. She was more hampered coming from somewhere as primitive as Rashemen. It is bothersome that another had the chance to finish her. We never had our proper duel, as she promised me." He shook his head and then looked to her. "If you tell anyone this I will—!"

"Do something creatively terrible to me, I know," Valla finished. She reached out and nudged his leg with her bare foot. "I won't."

He eyed her. "I know. And you're doing it again. I used to think it was an effect of your paladinhood."

"Like a charm?"

"Yes. Or some part of your aura, maybe."

"An interesting theory."

"Heartwarders are known to subvert the will of their enemies in a similar fashion."

"You would know if I were charming you, though."

He huffed and waved a hand. "Of course, which is why I dismissed a magical cause and decided it was simply because you are insufferable."

Valla laughed at the pot and kettle hypocrisy of his words, but said nothing of it. Instead, she studied him for a moment. "You never told me why you left."

The wizard's expression darkened. "I do not need to explain myself to you."

"Neither does Vicky, but she did anyway."

"And what was her excuse?"

"Solitude and isolation are important to Sharran worship and she felt she needed some time on her own to make certain she was keeping the path. We plotted several meeting points where we intended to reunite. When we didn't show up at any of them, she divined our location in Athkatla and was informed by her goddess that we were in some dire strait, which is why she stayed in the city even though it isn't exactly the most drow-friendly place."

Edwin's lips twisted. "Yes, well…"

"Did it have something to do with Thay?"

He huffed. "You will not leave this be, will you?" he demanded. "_Fine_. Yes, it had to do with Thay."

"I'm listening."

The wizard rolled his eyes. "The Red Wizards have no desire to be seen toiling with common adventurers or doing mindless charitable works. Baldur's Gate is no ally of theirs. My presence among your group would be difficult to explain to say the least."

Valla no longer had the useful perks that came with being a servant of goodness, such as the innate ability to sense falsehoods. Luckily, this was not required when it came to Edwin. For all of his aspirations to subjugate others and one day deify himself—or whatever his master plan was—he was really quite a terrible liar. His eyebrows shimmied like a Calimshite dancer's hips whenever he tried to hide anything from her, as if confused about which expressions to make to best convince her of his sincerity. She imagined it was easier among other Red Wizards. They were no doubt already convinced he was lying and it was instead a matter of obscuring _what_ the lie was.

Or maybe it was rooted in his fear of paladins. Not being able to lie to paladins made him comically incapable of competently lying to paladins… even former ones, as it happened.

"There's more to it than that, though. Isn't there?"

He glared at her as if she had interrupted him during a complicated summoning. "I had also been in contact with a few associates in the area that were checking in on my progress and were wondering why I was apparently travelling with a small circus, which included a sideshow featuring a Rashemi berserker who had once suffered at the hands of a Mind Flayer and his pocket weasel and a witch-to-be and they were curious why none of them were dead." He scowled into his wineglass. "There were other concerns as well."

"_More_? Like what?"

Edwin visibly cringed. "You."

"What? That I was a paladin?"

"It came up, certainly, but—"

"Oh, _Edwin_…"

He cringed again and this time he did so with his whole body in such a way that even his shoulders curled in on him. "I knew _nothing_," he insisted and it sounded like a plea. "I never knew a _thing_ when I was sent north, only that I was supposed to intercept a girl from Candlekeep and I was to monitor her whereabouts and wait for further instruction."

Valla felt like she had swallowed a stone. "How did _Thay_ know I was a Bhaalspawn?" she demanded. "And what do they want?"

"Bhaalspawn afford a rich research opportunity that doesn't come about otherwise," he argued. "As for _how_, I may not excel in Divination, but I assure you that there are those in Thay who have star charts and all that nonsense in their blood."

"So they knew about Sarevok as well."

Edwin made a face and the flickering light from the fireplace darkened the furrowing of his brow. "Not by name. I witnessed the divining as it happened, though I wasn't told what exactly it was that the old bat as searching for. I saw what must have been you and Sarevok—two stars plotted on a black field among hundreds of others. But what was curious to me…" He paused and appeared to chew his tongue for a moment as he mulled over his words. His eyes darted to the side to meet hers and held them. "You were these glowing spheres so bright you were difficult to look at and so much brighter than any other to be seen… but you were orbiting around each other as you moved and drawing others closer as you did."

"At the time, we were rather connected."

"As are all of Bhaal's children," he argued. "It could mean nothing in the long run and, as I said, I am no man of Divination. I simply found it interesting. It would be more interesting to know what became of Sarevok's star now that he is dead."

Valla hummed at this and then frowned. "Wait, they just said a girl from Candlekeep? It could have just as easily been Imoen! What if we had split up? Who would you have followed then?"

He snorted. "Please. As soon as I met you two, I knew it was you they meant. Your sister has less dignity than the Rashemi's squirrel." He glanced at her again as he drew his legs in to rest his feet upon the floor. His elbows came to rest upon his knees. "Does any of this bother you?"

"Well, _yeah_. I know a little something of your homeland, Edwin. If it's anyone's intention to take me back there and dissect me to know what makes a godchild tick, know that I'm not going without a big, bloody fight."

"I know," he answered simply. "That is what I told my associates and I also told them that they would die in the attempt. They did not take it to heart."

"No?"

"Dear Valla, you like to sniff and roll your eyes at my so-called ego, but I would like you to consider this: I enjoy my time away from Thay for a _reason_."

She blinked at that and then the horrifying realization settled in. "There's worse than you?"

He topped the glass again. "And not one of them deserves it as much."

Valla considered this new information.

It did not, by a long shot, _please_ her. Nor did it surprise her, though. She had known—could only suspect, though, really—for quite a long time that Edwin had to have been in Nashkel for something a great deal more important than Dynaheir's murder. Especially considering how lax he had been about _not_ murdering her. No, it hadn't been necessarily easy to convince him to leave the witch alone, but he also hadn't been keen on the idea of a one-on-one match versus Minsc either and promising to always stock good wine and no, they wouldn't make camping a _habit_ and the more spellcasters the merrier and wouldn't he please show them how it was done dissuaded him neatly enough.

The reality was that she didn't know _a lot_ about Thay, but she knew that Red Wizards usually spent time on machinations much larger than killing fledgling witches on their roads to adulthood.

So, his approach hadn't been subtle. Not, she thought, that he had to be. At the time, she had been desperate and panicking and _yes_, she was glad to take on anyone willing to help her kill the people trying to kill her. Except those Zhents. She had been only happy to be _rid_ of them. She was still fairly certain that the crazy necromancer had stolen some cuttings of her hair during the one night they had shared a camp. Sure, Imoen had been all thrills and giggles, cheerful about what the, frankly, terrifying little halfling had taught her over their day of travel together, but nope, nope, and _nope,_ a day and a night was more than enough. It was a personal goal of hers to keep herself and Imoen—especially Imoen—alive. That meant, at least in part, keeping their livers from being pickled and molested. Among other things.

She wasn't sure how it stacked up; how one picked Thayans over Zhents. But while Edwin had his flaws—numerous, loud, and annoying in their number they were, certainly—he at least wasn't mad. And she believed she could manipulate him. Mad Zhents, not so much.

Apparently, she had left Candlekeep with awful chainmail, her sword, and enough brazen confidence to convince herself of at least that much.

Speaking of Edwin, hunting Dynaheir had been a convenient cover or she had been a rival that Edwin had stumbled upon on the road— or whatever. She had never been his real target. Valla was, which made a great deal more sense in retrospect. Not to exaggerate her own importance—which she had known nothing about at the time—or undermine the reality of Thayan and Rashemi tensions, but it just didn't make sense to hunt someone like Dynaheir. She was little more than an apprentice looking back…

"So you were in Nashkel just to find me?" she asked.

Edwin heaved a disgusted, long-suffering sound. His fingers fiddled and twitched with each other and she remembered how he used to twist his rings while he sat ponderously lost in thought or while vehemently arguing some point of archaic theory with Dynaheir. "I'll kill that diviner someday," he muttered. "She told me where you would hail from and then flung me through a dimension door, singing some nonsense about the Fates placing me in the way of my quarry. Then I found myself abandoned in that backwater sinkhole. And keep in mind, I was given my assignment more than a month before you finally deigned to show up. As much as I hate the road, I think I would have preferred slogging through every swamp, war-torn high road, and wind-bitten desert than monitoring every face in and out of that infected eyesore."

"Sorry, I was busy being hunted and traumatized and all that."

He rolled his eyes but passed the wine glass back to her as if offering a consolation or an apology of sorts.

She took another drink. "What about your associates?"

"Dead," he answered.

"Dead?"

He glanced at her. The fiddling abruptly ceased and his expression was equal parts smug and apprehensive, as if he was quite proud of his own cleverness, but quite certain that she might not approve of it. "You'll recall that I took a second share from the party savings before leaving."

"_Yeah_, I wasn't going to mention that, but since you brought it up—not that it matters now since that's all long gone, _but_—"

"It paid for their convenient and timely demises." He was examining his hands now and the carefully groomed spellcasting points of his nails. She remembered telling him once, before they had really gotten to know each other and when he still blustered and poked fun at her for her standing as a paladin, that he had beautiful hands. It had flustered him into a state of utter speechlessness. "The Shadow Thieves in the Gate were very happy to arrange something convenient for the Hero of the city… and then make it look like you had disposed of them to make a point."

She blinked at him, taken entirely aback. "You… you were terribly productive for a man who disappeared almost the second we got back to the surface. How very… Thayan of you."

He spared her a pointed look. "I knew I had very little time before they would seek me out and needed to be prepared. Thay was very interested in you and they did not take my first warning to heart. I do not appreciate being ignored."

"Yeah, but you weren't just protecting me… were you?"

Edwin sniffed and plucked the wine glass out of her hand. "_No_. I do still intend to use you as a shield whenever convenient. They were as much a threat to me as to you. It served us both. Making it look like it was your doing was for the thieves' convenience—a way for them to cover their own involvement."

"And just another message to send Thay to reinforce your point."

"Oh? How convenient. _Ridiculous, impudent girl_."

Valla eyed him for several moments, weighing and measuring this new information. "So, why didn't you come back?"

"I had no desire at the time to anger Thay by continuing our association after I told them that pursuing you was pointless. It could not end well for anyone involve."

"But now—"

"Things have changed."

That sounded ominous.

And, if his tone was anything to go by, the end of this particular conversation on the matter.

Valla would not push. She had done that too much for one night and she was lucky that Edwin had humored her badgering with so much grace thus far. In fact, he had taken it with extraordinary patience. And he had given her… well, he had told her everything hadn't he? And she had no reason not to believe him. Unless _this_ was the big betrayal he had been working up to all this time. Time would tell, she supposed.

Even so.

"I'm sorry I threw my shoes at you," she said at length while she stared into the fire, at a loss for what else to say, wanting to thank him for the trouble he had gone to in securing their mutual safety but it felt wrong to thank anyone for arranging an assassination.

"As well you should be," the wizard answered haughtily, but the corner of his lips had pulled upward with a genuine smile and his dark eyes were glittering with amusement.

Valla laughed and then took a long breath in through her nose. Well, if they were to change the subject… "Could you do some research for me?"

"Research? What about?"

"Vampires. Someone was brought into the Hall before I came to the library. Her throat had been all-but torn out. The man with her said it had been vampire."

Edwin made a face. "There is not much to _know_. They are greater undead that sustain themselves by drinking blood. If they're lucky, they remain sentient, if not wholly driven by their hunger, and some even maintain whatever power they had in life, but I'm sure you know the old trick about staking them with sufficiently sharpened pieces of wood—a rather glaring sort of weakness if you ask me, although I suppose we all might claim we're susceptible to wooden stakes driven through the heart, no? Concerning vampires, the challenge would be in getting one to lay prone long enough to do that. I hear that's rather a challenge" He tipped his head, curious. "Why? I was rather hoping your Fall would relieve you of the urge to do petty good deeds for the sake of utter strangers."

She sank a bit more into the couch. "It isn't about the girl. Even if I wanted to go after the monster, I wouldn't know where to look and none of us have the equipment for that yet. Just call it a feeling."

"I could. Or you could tell me about the wheels spinning in your head."

Valla glanced at him. "Under the Promenade, during our escape, there was a vampire quelling some of the other intruders. It was happening in a chamber I was in charge of clearing, so the others missed it and I was too weak to do anything other than slip back the way I had come in, but I know what I saw."

"You believe it's connected. It could be a coincidence."

"There's that word again. Do you believe that?'

He twisted one of the braided ends of his mustache around a forefinger. "Hm, if you were anyone but you, I might." He glanced into the dark behind them where the firelight didn't reach to illuminate the bookshelves. It might not have shown otherwise, but the half-light illuminated the bothered furrows around his eyes. "I shall do some reading. One would think a holy order should have some interesting collected knowledge on the subject of the undead."

She nodded and then tried and failed to stifle a yawn. The library was warm and the air was filled with the smell of old books and if she closed her eyes she could pretend for half-seconds at a time that she was back among the stacks of Candlekeep.

And somewhere in those half-seconds, she forgot to open her eyes again.

* * *

Getting one of the smaller yards for their purposes hadn't been a challenge. The squires trained early in the morning so as long as they could wait for a few hours, they would have their pick.

So, some hours after dawn, they trooped into the training yard as a group with the meager equipment they had gathered so far and some they had borrowed from the Radiant Heart. Their weapons couldn't be wasted on each other and frankly they weren't too worried what of the Order's they damaged.

Viconia and Jaheira both hovered nearby, ostensibly practicing close combat but hovering nonetheless and Edwin was 'supervising' the proceedings from a patch of shade with his nose buried in some book or another.

Yoshimo had happily lent a hand to Minsc in strapping on some padded armor. The ranger was restless and had jumped at the chance to be Valla's test subject for her rusty arms.

"You have good form!" Keldorn was behind her, checking her stance, the straps of her own armor, and making tiny corrections to her grip. He stepped back a bit to examine her again. "I have wanted to ask, and I apologize if this is impertinent, but I am surprised you had a chance to squire considering where you grew up."

"I 'squired' for every paladin and seasoned fighter that passed through Candlekeep from the time I was eight or nine," Valla replied a bit sheepishly. "None of them remained for very long. I learned to really fight from the Watchers and my father. Not conventional, but I like to think my survival speaks to their success."

"I agree. You must have trained under someone longer than the others, though…"

"I did."

She motioned for Minsc to come at her.

The ranger, who had been having an intense conversation with a shoulder-mounted Boo, hesitated.

Valla lowered her staff. "What? Do you… is your head hurting? I mean, we can put this off if you need to see Jaheira? Or Vicky?"

Boo had retreated under Minsc's collar as the ranger straightened to address her. "My head is hard and sturdy like rock," he assured her and from somewhere to the side they heard Edwin and Yoshimo both try suppress their amusement and fail—well, Yoshimo tried. Minsc didn't seem to hear either of them. His focus was on Valla. "But Minsc could not forgive Minsc if he hurt Valla."

She frowned. "What? No, Minsc! I wouldn't be out here if I wasn't ready for this. I mean, this is all healer approved and supervised." She even had a healthy dusting of stubble coming in to cover her scalp. Two more weeks and one might dare to call it hair. She gestured. "C'mon, have at me!"

Minsc fiddled with his quarterstaff and she recalled how he would do the same with his weapons and wondered if there existed anyone excepting races of giant large enough to _fiddle_ with forearm-length hafts of two-handed broadswords. Sarevok, perhaps, but the idea of her stern half-brother fiddling with anything was a laughable thought.

For not the first time, she realized, it hurt to think of Sarevok.

"Minsc?" Valla glanced back at Keldorn, gestured for his patience, and then edged closer to the berserker. Taking his arm, she pulled him aside. He towered over her and her hand looked like that of a child's upon his forearm, but he moved willingly and easily under her direction, like a boy guided by an elder. "Speak to me, Minsc. What's the problem?"

The man's enormous hands tightened into fists. "I watched…" His voice had changed and she heard a clarity in his words that she couldn't remember hearing since before Dynaheir's death. "He hurt you… I saw him and I couldn't… I tried…" He uncurled and curled his fingers again.

She thought of his cage so close to hers and at once remembered spontaneous outbreaks of chaos that would shatter the mage's focus, the din of the dungeon broken by the snap of chain or the screech of twisting bars.

_The man—name, she knew his name, but it was just out of her reach—was thrown against the wall so hard by the golem that she was shocked when he lifted himself from the floor again onto his hands and knees. She was a twisted heap at the bottom of her cage, but a reflex reached out to him through the bars._

_ He had done this before—broken loose just as she thought she was reaching her end._

_ Reaching for him seemed to reignite his fury. "Minsc will tear you apart will all both his hands!" he howled._

_ Minsc. _Minsc. _The name brought with it memories and happiness and hope…_

_ "Restrain him."_

_ The golem promptly crushed the warrior beneath its blunt leg, forcing him flat to the floor with the entire weight of its body and the horror of it tore a scream from Valla's throat. It jolted her forward and with pain-numbed limbs she threw herself against the iron of the cage to be closer to him, to see him, and if she could just touch him and channel her goddess…_

_ The wizard ignored them both as he examined the bars that had been uprooted from the stone floor and torn from the wall. "_Fascinating_. The duergar seemed so certain that that cage would hold. I must admit, barbarian, you have impressed me. That is the second cage this week. If I were not so intrigued, I would kill you for these continued interruptions of my work. No matter. You will be held elsewhere until another prison is constructed to hold you."_

Valla reached to grab the ranger's head between her hands and forced him to look at her. "I remember you trying, though."

"I could not for Dynaheir…"

"I think Dynaheir must have tried for us and that's how…" She shook her head and gave him a pointed look. "He'll answer for our fallen. If I have to drag him to the gates of the Hells with my own hands and shove him through, he will. Right now, though, I'm hale and we have to get back where we were. Better even. Do you remember our fight with Sarevok?"

Minsc nodded. She could see the rage in him quell. "It was a battle for skalds and bards," he said.

"And Irenicus is even stronger," she replied. "So we will have to be as well. Vicky and Jaheira healed me. Now I need you to help me."

He nodded again, more certain this time. She lowered her hands and his shoulders straightened as the gleam came back in his eyes. He looked like Minsc again, the way she always knew him. Did it make sense that he seemed more crazed and dangerous in his moments of clarity? That, when sane, he frightened her more than he ever did as a "madman"?

There were no further delays.

It was amazing how quickly, easily, _instinctively_ fighting came back to her.

Or maybe it wasn't.

Maybe it wasn't even Bhaal's damned fault.

She had spent too much time crouched in briars and crawling on her belly through ditches and dusty shafts to get in front of packs of Chill and Talon and shrieking kobolds. In the best cases she had Khalid and his reassuring smiles. In the worst, she had Edwin and the whining never stopped.

"Tyrran?"

Valla's peripheral vision was no good because even in the partial shade of the hedged-in court she had to wear her mantle, but her hearing was still quite excellent so she easily detected the whispers. She turned her head to look and spotted a few young squires gathered in an arched passageway at the far side of the court in the shadows.

"Valla!"

That was Keldorn calling Minsc's shot at her ribs with the aft of his quarterstaff and she just managed to dance back out of his range. It was good to know her footwork was coming back with everything else as well…

"Then why would she not have joined the Order? Or been the member of another?" one of the squires said. "And when Tyrrans and Tormish Fall… I don' know. Heard it be a nasty 'fair."

"Hm, who then? Ilmater? Mystra?"

"Can Ilmatari Fall?"

Valla met Minsc's overhead swing with her own staff and then lifted a leg and pushed him away with a solid kick that nearly took him off his feet.

She understood their curiosity. If the group was a strange sight to farmers and the like accustomed to wayward adventuring sorts plodding through their villages and chasing the kobolds out of their hedgerows and fields and rescuing their daughters from the nearby abandoned fortresses, they were especially strange to sheltered, noble-born sorts living in rigid, burn-the-drow Athkatla.

That didn't mean she appreciated their scrutiny.

"I did not know a Bhaalspawn could even _be_ a paladin… should not the Order take her head just in case?"

"Ye can' blame someone for their blood."

"My tutor says that the mind is a plaything of the body."

Valla was locked staff-to-staff with Minsc in a contest of strength when the squire spoke last and stepped away from the ranger abruptly, which caused the large man to fall over face-first into the dirt with a distressed squeak from somewhere in the confines of his shirt. "And I once read a book kept in the Archives of Candlekeep written by a mage that disputed the existence of the gods themselves," she snapped. "Learned does not mean _right_."

Both of the young men blanched at being directly addressed and looked to the exit as if contemplating escape, even if only for a half-second.

"For your information, my mind is my own. As is my body and my blood, whatever its parts. If all you know of the Children or the Troubles are the stories your wetnurses have told you to scare you into order, do not speak of them. And you, do not speak of what it means to be a paladin or what it takes to become one. You're barely breeched and your father's title bought you the right to polish armor, so you're in no position to pass judgement on anyone," she went on. She turned back toward the sparring circle but paused. "And if you must know, I served the Lady Firehair; Sune. Now, you speculations can cease and you can leave."

With that she returned to Minsc and reached up to stroke Boo and murmur and apology to both the ranger and the ruffled rodent, who had been squished during his caretaker's impromptu meeting with the ground.

* * *

So this chapter is full of stuff...

And I have actually very little to say other than yes Sunite.


	5. Listen

Valla was aware of what it was like to be young.

She was also aware that it had not been so long ago that she had been such. A little more than a year, in fact. Hell, by most estimates, she still was.

It just seemed so far away.

In short, dinner in the mess was more annoying tonight than it had been the night before.

"Sunite! I don't buy it."

"I can. Have you looked at her from the back? She's skinny, but…" Illustrative gestures followed.

"_Usstan shlu'ta s'luge mina ka dos daewl_," Viconia growled.

Valla smiled to her plate, her chin nearly on her chest. Behind her, Jaheira was doing some last minute cleaning of a split at the top of her head that would not stop bleeding and that she wouldn't let the woman stitch since it meant shaving what hair had started to grow.

Across the table, Viconia, maybe to spite every member of the Order who had a problem with the color of her skin and hair, had not worn her hood. She tapped the table twice, drawing the priestess' attention and then made a series of hand gestures. _They are not worth it._

The priestess tilted her head and looked genuinely surprised. "You remember your lessons," she said.

Even Jaheira's movements had briefly paused, as if she too were surprised.

"I do," Valla replied. She glanced over at the older squires that were huddled conspiratorially together at another table and whispering—albeit not quietly enough. She gestured again._ They mean no harm._

Viconia gestured back, empathic. _Respect._

Valla smiled.

Gorion had taught her what Elvish he knew, with supplemental lessons from Firebead, all the while she grew. So she spoke it as fluently as she did the common tongue. Thanks to Reevor she could even swear quite colorfully in Dwarven. Language was a key, her father had said once upon a time. It would open doors for her that she might find otherwise closed.

Asking Viconia about her homeland, about herself, about drow culture, about customs, and then eventually to teach her the language, had been a way of bridging a gap. It was not pleasant—Viconia was not a pleasant person—but by expressing an interest in what Viconia was, she put action behind her words.

It wasn't just saying that being drow didn't disgust her.

It was proving it.

And, hell, Viconia had fun along the way. That is to say, Viconia had been acerbic and mean and insulted her accent.

High Drow and its complex, runic alphabet too far removed from any Elvish roots that might be familiar to Valla's eyes would be beyond her, the priestess had sneered, even if it would be fun to secretly tweak the noses of the Underdark high society by teaching such a thing to a mere human. Low Drow was, no matter what her people wanted to say, similar enough to Elvish and she'd find some footing in it, even if they could not converse in it openly lest they get themselves killed. Even so, she would teach her. And she would supplement it with what was known as Drow Sign Language.

Valla had refrained from asking if there were such a thing as deaf drow because she knew the answer, but when Viconia had gone on to explain that it was an assassin's tool that utilized hand signs and facial expressions she hadn't been able to resist asking: "Does it include ear wiggles?"

The priestess had fallen to pieces laughing and assured her that that was the stupidest question she had ever heard. "And no."

It had made Edwin quite hysterical at first, because apparently half the gestures had some distant archaic-seeming counterpart—or would if they wiggled their pinkies. Like they were a finger tweak away from opening an abyssal gate. Wiggling their pinkies aside, it made splitting the party and communicating behind the backs of itchy bandits leagues easier.

Being useful to their group had made Viconia feel as if she belonged, which made her less skittish and more insufferable.

And it was when the bandit camp lay in ruins and the bodies of both the Chill and Talon mercenaries lay dead at their feet that Viconia, as she reached to heal a cut above the Sunite's brow, first called her "abbil" without any piled on sarcasm or the usual, ironic twist of her lips.

For two people who served goddesses that were enemies and diametric opposites, it was a good start.

The squires were still talking and Viconia's glare had turned venomous. Valla could not hear them anymore as apparently they had had the good sense to tone it down, but the only thing that could save them from drow hearing was a cement wall or the good sense not to talk about such things so near the subject.

Valla reached across the table and covered the drow's hand with hers. Their flesh displayed so closely together was a study in wild contrast; warm peach and cool onyx. "_Khal'abbil_," she said gently. "_Xa'huuli jalukul, xa'huuli wiles. Xas?"_

Viconia raised her brow and then a smile of concession curled her lips and she sighed. "_Xas_."

Valla nodded.

Jaheira finally took a seat beside her. "Bjornin has had to lean over three times to explain something to the Prelate," she told them. "The hand gestures are off putting."

Viconia rolled her eyes. "Paranoid, untrusting _rivven_."

"I would think such traits would appeal to you," the half-elf sniped back.

"Of course, but at the moment they are very awkward."

Jaheira barked a laugh in response and passed some food down.

Valla smiled at them.

But her eyes travelled over Viconia's shoulder to the squires again. A few were blatantly staring.

It was enough.

Worthless men with worthless thoughts or not, she still slipped away shortly after finishing her bread.

In an unrelated incident, the squires began to scream and fling themselves away from their table when thousands of black spiders and beetles poured out from beneath the serving platters and spread across the table as a flood and pour off the edges onto the floor.

The quartermaster's voice boomed out a shout demanding that whichever the clerics responsible for the prank step forward, but whatever hope he had of regaining control over the hysterical teenagers was dashed when some more spiders poured from his pant legs and the shriek he emitted was pitched to shatter glass.

The Prelate and the paladins were in tears, laughing too hard to call order themselves, so the house staff was left with absolutely no choice but to resort to ear-pinching and wooden spoons.

In the midst of things, the adventuring table was undisturbed. Minsc had considered for a moment leaping to, well, _someone's_ rescue, or at least the attempt, but Jaheira shushed him and redirected his attention to his food. "Your meat will get cold," she said.

Yoshimo poured more wine for both Jaheira and Viconia and looked them over with a wide, appreciate smile, but he said nothing.

The women themselves shared an approving look between them but were silent as well.

* * *

The voice was quiet, almost too soft to be heard, and the words were foreign, but the sound of them was evil itself. It made her flesh burn and her taint _sing_.

She couldn't even repeat them. Lead formed in the pit of her gut the second she considered even a syllable of what she heard and her blood roared in her ears, disgusted and thrilled, sick and giddy in equal measures.

She had placed it some time ago after digging among the volumes of work in Eltan's private library where he kept many curiosities, including tomes of eldritch lore.

_Dark speech_.

The tongue of the darkest gods. Speech so evil and tainted that denizens of the Lower Planes feared it.

Valla wished it had never learned this trick; how to harass her in her waking hours. If only it had remained confined to her nights.

Tears streaking her cheeks, she staggered down the hall with her hands clutched over her ears as she tried to remember where she needed to go to get outside to the exercise yards.

Air.

Something had her throat.

There were hands.

_His_ hands.

_Blue eyes_.

Valla threw herself out the courtyard doors into the evening air like water breaking a dam wall. She staggered, gasping at the air, and tried to find the surface of her own thoughts.

But it hurt.

Everything seemed to hurt, like the _words_ had done something to her skin; to her bones.

But it was _her _blood and it was _her_ life, wasn't it? The tears were coming harder and hotter.

Why was it so easy before?

What had he _done_?

How was she supposed to save Imoen—?

She breathed out and looked up, her eyes stinging from the sweat that had been beading on her brow and the tears that were still pooling in them.

_Imoen_.

There were torches that illuminated just enough of the practice yard and the surrounding paths to make it accessible for servants who might want to pass through it for convenience sake, but there wasn't so much light that it drowned out the stars overhead. Even against the backdrop of the city's glow, she could make out at least one constellation Firebead had showed her.

Valla closed her eyes and took a breath.

Irenicus was… out of the way, for the moment.

_Bhaal_ was the great, terrible god of murder who himself had been, in judicious irony, murdered.

And she was still standing. She did not have any words of power nor did she speak the tongue of gods feared even the slimiest thing pulled from the abyss, but she was alive and that was something—_everything_. It was certainly more than her sire could say.

So, all else would be _silent_.

And, at once, it was.

"Valla?"

Valla turned toward the voice and saw Keldorn hesitantly stepping toward her from the same doorway she had just thrown herself from like a madman. He was approaching now with that same tact and grace that kept him from asking prying questions before, too kind to intrude where he might be unwanted.

The tears suddenly started anew. But the first, trembling sob hadn't even finished breaking from her throat when he had crossed the gap between them to embrace her. Grateful beyond words, she sank into him as a boneless, shaking heap.

If he were alive, it would have been Khalid. It _had_ been Khalid. In the catacombs under Candlekeep, it had been his hands pulling her through the tunnels and guiding her back to the surface and then it was his hands again, holding her hair and rubbing her back when she failed to keep her breakfast down the next morning.

She cried harder thinking of him.

Keldorn, for his part, simply held her. With one arm he braced her, as if knowing how weak she felt just then, and with the other curled around her shoulders he rubbed her neck and back. But he did not shush her or murmur nonsense of how anything would be well again.

And there were no words for how much she appreciated that either.

Maybe that was why the next words simply came: "I just wanted the pain to stop. I was too weak to stand, but laying down felt like it was _breaking_ things. Then he'd put me away alone from the others and I was in so much pain I couldn't think or pray or do anything but listen to the taint. It speaks. I don't know how else to explain it. Sometimes it's many voices, like it's the souls of every murdered person screaming at once, and sometimes I think… I hear…"

Keldorn's arms tightened around her and she heard him mutter a soft, uncharacteristic curse beside her ear.

Valla felt the tears come on again and she covered her face. "He said He'd make it stop," she whispered. "I just wanted it to stop and He said… if I died I'd never be able to help Imoen or the other escape so I needed… so I let Him… and then I couldn't…"

Keldorn had pulled back from her enough to look at her as she spoke and his horror, as much as he tried to contain it, was apparent in the way he looked at her. "Valla…"

"He was there with me!" she shrieked, unable to contain herself now that the words were coming out and she needed to tell _someone_ how mad she had gone in that cell. "He's dead but I felt His hands touching my hair and… and Irenicus' spells didn't hurt anymore and every time I was left alone again He promised revenge, I just needed to do one last thing, and then we could escape…"

"What last thing?" Keldorn asked, his hands gently easing hers away from her head, prying her nails from where they had gouged into her flesh and left bloody crescents in their wake. He lifted her chin to look into her eyes. "Valla? What last thing did the voice say you needed to do?"

She found her footing again in his voice. He was worried and it was not in the way the Prelate was, where he feared her in as equal measures as he did her safety. His concern was her well-being and that alone. "I never found out," she whispered. "I Fell. The pain of it was so sharp, like someone had torn my soul in half… it woke me up. It was like coming out of a trance. I was horrified. Then it wasn't very long after that that we escaped."

He had cradled her hands between his, as if trying to warm them. "Could you feel your goddess at all when you were under this influence?"

Valla shook her head. "I couldn't feel anything," she mumbled, keeping her head ducked so he wouldn't see what a mess her face was in the aftermath of her hysterics.

"Was your mind your own at all?"

Her memory of it was foggy at best, but that had nothing to do with Irenicus. Her taint was playing games. "I tried to fight," she said. "After I gave in, though, and the pain stopped…"

"You were like a child under the influence of their parent—doing what they told you was best."

She cringed at the words and he embraced her again, both as if to shield her from them after the fact and to apologize.

When he spoke next, his tone was thoughtful as he rested his chin atop her head. "Lady Sune will have to forgive me. I have misjudged her."

"I don't know what you mean."

Keldorn set her away again and drew a handkerchief from his pocket first to dry her tears and then to attend to the cuts in her scalp that had begun to bleed more freely than the others. "You gave into the influence of your blood. Depending on your vows, another god might have turned away then, but your Lady did not. She only let you go when Falling was the only thing that could save you from doing something you could not ever come back from." He smiled. "Even the ultimate reprisal from god to servant became an act of love."

Valla had considered it before. Then she had pushed the thought away again, ashamed.

"Consider it," he finished gently. "Now come, let's get you inside. We will try to wash these cuts properly and hope your nurses do not see them, hm?"

She nodded, but he was already guiding her back to the light pouring out into the courtyard from the opened doors. "Keldorn… if I sleep…"

Pity played briefly in his eyes, but he dispensed of it quickly. "Then, for as long as these old bones will allow it, I will stay awake with you. You do not have to tell the others now."

* * *

"Will you tell me something of what Valla was like before she…?"

Jaheira looked back at Yoshimo who seemed to be struggling to find the tactful way of phrasing what he wanted to say.

She had gone around kicking doors that morning demanding laundry since she wouldn't put up with offensive smells or complaints about missing the wash. In the sitting room with the morning streaming through the windows, she was now compiling everything she had gathered into a single sack to be left for the maids. The windows were opened, letting in a cool breeze and she could hear the others even from here shouting at each other in the yard.

It had surprised her when Yoshimo offered to stay behind and help mend torn seams and popped buttons. He sat on the divan nearby and even without his armor or his weapons, it was obvious enough to a person of experience that he was dangerous—lithe and wiry, whip-like in his build with strong forearms. Every move he made was graceful and flowed into the next.

"Before she became such a hysterical mess?" she supplied

He smiled fractionally at that, his eyes on his work. He had a few shirts in front of him already sorted from the pile and a threaded needle in hand to work with. "I didn't…"

"I know," she said. "I don't mean it as such either. As for your question, I did not know Valla as a child. We met shortly after she fled her home. It was only a couple days after her father's death. So I have certainly seen her like this before. Well, perhaps not quite so…"

Jaheira trailed off.

The thief seemed to understand anyway. "How old was she?"

"Eighteen. Little more than a girl," the druid said. "We kept in touch with Gorion, even as we travelled with our work. He knew Harper business was taking us into the area and… hm, I suspect now he knew something of what was happening with the Iron Crisis, but he would not say anything less cryptic than how unsafe Candlekeep had become for them." She shook out another tunic. "We had arranged to meet at the Friendly Arm and form a plan from there. I still remember the first time I saw the two of them—children in scrubby armor caked in mud and terrified. Escorted by guards no less. Apparently an assassin had been waiting for them on the steps outside—a bold move in a place that tolerates no hostility."

Yoshimo smiled but there was no joy to be found in it. "The bards prefer to leave such details out, I think—young girls fresh to the world fighting to keep their throats from getting cut."

Jaheira hummed, looking grave. "They do."

"What of your first impressions of them without the mud?"

She tried to suppress her amusement and failed so her smile came out as a smirk. She shook her head. "A waif with ratty hair and too many freckles—if one can take comfort in constancy, there is great comfort to be found in knowing Imoen. She did not start practicing magic until after she had left Candlekeep, so you see we experienced the brunt of her mischief in full force; thieving fingers and magical missteps." She shook her head, obviously remembering something that had brought a smile briefly to her lips before it faded again. "As for Valla… I confess that knowing she was a Sunite had me disposed the worst to her before we met. I expected someone vain and flighty. And she was vain certainly—she is still, do you not wonder why she likes your gift so much?—but she was no more than any girl freshly bloomed and she was sheltered of course but well-read to make-up for it and everything else I would have expected of a child raised by a man like her father."

Yoshimo finished his stitching and looking up before reaching for another shirt. "When did she find out…?"

Jaheira glanced at the man. His interest seemed entirely in earnest—a man curious about a friend and eager learn how to help them by understanding what plagued them. It wasn't what she expected of his kind. Bounty hunters were not charitable by nature nor the sort to work cohesively in groups. They certainly weren't usually of this affable breed. "Her last visit home. Her father left a letter among his things hoping she would find her way back if something happened to him before he had a chance to explain. Or, perhaps he knew she would."

"Was he a Seer?"

"I wondered sometimes. There are not many _old_ Harpers in the world. Yet, he always denied it. Just lucky, he said. I only buy that from Tymorans."

Yoshimo seemed to consider this for a long time. When he spoke again, he sounded thoughtful. "I was a boy during the Troubles but the Time of Troubles was not…" He laughed, but it was for a lack of words or filler. "It was not a _thing_ in Kara-tur.".

Jaheira paused again, thoughtful. "Well, no I suppose it wouldn't have been," she said, blinking. Then she laughed. "How strange that must have sounded to your countrymen: 'half way around the world, their gods were thrown down on their heads.' I can't imagine what you thought."

He smiled. "It was stranger to come here and hear the stories. People who had _seen_ their gods up close, who had witnessed the carnage, to know that gods had _died_. Then to hear of children born at the time with godsblood…" He rubbed at his neck. "I'm not sure I understand your old friend. I mean… she's a lovely, wonderful girl, a hero even—but he couldn't have _known_ she would be. Why did he take in such a child at such risk?"

"I never knew what she was, but I questioned his reasons as well," the druid replied. "It seemed a strange choice for a man who had already lived half his life and had never seemed to want children before. I'm not even fully aware of the circumstances of her adoption, though."

Yoshimo had taken another shirt from the pile and was stitching the sleeve slowly as he considered his next words. "Do you think she'll recover?"

Jaheira weighed this answer against the girl she knew; against the child she had first met at the Friendly Arm covered in mud and scrapes from the road, the fledgling hero with newly cut teeth that had led them out of the mines of Nashkel with a sigil and more questions than answers, and the hardened, battle-weary paladin in scraped armor with haunted eyes kneeling outside her father's temple in the Undercity saying a prayer over the body of a woman she admired.

"I have never known anyone with a will as ferocious as Valla's," she said at length. "She will recover to spite the mage and her blood itself. Simply watch."

* * *

"Who is she?'

Parda looked up from the book he was repairing.

Valla might have had fey in her for the largeness of her eyes and the sweetness of her round face. At seven years, she was not very tall for her age, but she was lean and wiry and the Gatekeeper liked to boast that she was good with a knife and light like a feather on her feet. In the blue, summer's dress she wore, however, which skimmed her toes and sat wide on her bony shoulders, she looked quite angelic. The garment itself had been a gift from Tethoril the Midsummer previous. The child herself had shrieked, kissed the First Reader, and insisted on changing into it immediately, blithely unaware of the protective runes that circled the collar and hem, which were disguised as pretty scrollwork in gold thread.

At present, she stood at the feet of one of the many statues dispersed throughout the Keep.

A handful of deities were worshipped within its walls or at least their names were spoken with reverence and respect for the sake of the works kept safe in the vaults of the stronghold. The statue she stood before was the figure of a woman. The statue was rosy marble and its features were so carefully and lovingly rendered that the folds of her gown and the mass of ringlets that fell from her crown to her feet appeared real and silken until touched. Her delicate hands were held to her breasts and her face was carved with exquisite and heartbreaking care, depicting ageless, ethereal beauty.

The little girl's expression might have been considered neutral if not for how utterly and wholly focused on the statue she was. Her eyes never left its face. She was transfixed. In awe, maybe.

Parda had set aside his knife to approach. He stood beside the girl to look upon the statue for a moment and then he looked down at the child. She admired many of the works throughout the Keep, stared adoringly at the pages of some of the more elaborate and carefully rendered books with their gilded covers and the ink drawings that filled their margins and borders. He had, however, never seen her so hypnotized. "That is the Sune."

"Who?"

He smiled. "You have not been attending your theology lessons, I see."

She finally tore her gaze away from the statue's visage and had the good decency to look sheepish, although she grinned even so. "Oops?"

He chuckled and patted her head. "Sune is the goddess of love and beauty, among some other minor things. This statue was actually carved after the artist glimpsed her face during the Avatar Crisis—that is, when the gods became mortals for a short time."

"Why is there a statue of her here in Candlekeep?"

"Well, the lady also has a great fondness for the fine arts, you see." He gestured to indicate the Keep at large. "And you have certainly noticed in your unsupervised and unsanctioned explorations, all the paintings and sculptures we keep here—even the books on our shelves. These things are art, my dear. They are treasures. Some of them are even one of a kind. They were collected here because there was nothing else like them on all of Toril and to lose them would be to lose pieces of history itself. It is for their sake that this place pays respects to every deity who might see to protecting such things." He regarded her with interest. "Why so curious, dearest?"

Valla sucked her lip and considered the statue for another long moment. "I've dreamed about her."

He blinked, utterly thrown by the enormity of the child's statement. "I—you what?" He laughed a bit. "Child, how could you know it was her? You did not even know her name."

"She called herself Lady Firehair. I thought it sounded silly."

Parda choked suddenly on his next breath.

"Parda? Are you—?"

"When? How long?" he cut in quickly, his heart suddenly fluttering.

"A couple weeks." She was frowning at him. In a smaller voice, she added: "She sang to me once."

Parda was speechless.

And then he was filled with ecstasy he had never known. It was like discovering a new celestial body—no, it was a thousand times better. It was discovering that this child that he loved more than his own self need not be damned by her sire. That maybe no child like her was damned by simply _being_.

A Calling.

He was no paladin, but he had read thousands of books in his time on Toril and he had heard the stories frequently enough to know their similarities.

The goddess wanted her.

Sune wanted this girl that no one in this world seemed to want but them in this Keep; this child that some would see only reason to kill.

"Oh, Parda!"

The old man's knees had given in beneath him and he sat down upon the statue's pedestal and began to weep like a boy.

He had venerated Oghma all his life, but he found himself whispering and muttering thanks for the first time in his years to the goddess of love and how infinite that capacity for love seemed.

"Parda!" Valla's frantic little hands were on his face, wiping at the tears an pulling at his cowl. "I didn't mean to make you sad! Don't tell Papa! I don't want him to be sad too—!"

Parda embraced the girl at once and laughed as he pet her hair and smothered his tears against its downy softness. "No, I am not sad," he assured her and he pressed a kiss to her crown. He pulled away and touched her face that wrinkled in confusion. In this light, he thought, maybe her hair looked more red than it had ever before. Or maybe it was his imagination. He smiled at her, his eyes watery and his lips trembling and he happy beyond measure. "Let… let us begin a theology lesson now. I will find Gorion later."

* * *

I'm sure some hardcore DnD nerd will tell me that's not how Falling would work. Just going to tell you now I don't care.

I don't think a Chaotic Good deity of love would either.

Next chapter will take us away from the boring character focused stuff and take us to the plot. I promise.

And yes Dark Speech, according to the Forgotten Realms wiki, is in fact the tongue of the dark gods so evil that even devils and demons fear its powers to corrupt.


	6. Freedom

Valla didn't know how she got into these situations.

"Jan!"

"Got him!"

It was an honest mistake, really. A wrong turn down the wrong staircase.

All she had _wanted_ to do was re-acquire a stolen toy for the restless spirit of a murdered halfling child and she had ended up stumbling on… well, she wasn't sure what this was. All she did know was that these guards were unusually hostile considering she had just taken a wrong turn.

Maybe it had something to do with the people in the cells all around them.

"I gotta say, I had a feeling about you when we met, Vee! I could smell the adventure!"

The gnome was new too. He had latched onto her like a barnacle by the bar trying to avoid some drunken dwarves in the corner, sell her turnips, and pawn something else that sounded like it might tear her arm off called a "flasher". Then again, he had also just crippled a slaver with a bolt through the knee with the contraption of a crossbow he liked to call "Gertie", so yeah he could stay.

"I'm a magnet for it, I'm told!"

"My cousin Nimdel was a magnet too but that involved an accident having to do with magic that reversed his polarity—"

Valla kicked a guard backward into a cell door. When hands reached out and lashed him into place, she stabbed him, opening his leather armor and his belly in one stroke. "Guards now, story later!" she shouted.

"Gotcha!"

She really did understand why Jaheira had been afraid to let her run any errands on her own, even if the errand was as simple as "drop toothache remedy off to Belgrade and ask for news". They were lucky if the task of getting up in the morning wasn't complicated by a minor cataclysm or at least an orc raiding party.

Valla dropped another guard with a swift disarm and a sharp introduction of his skull to the stone of the floor and a hush fell over the narrow passageway.

Then a dusky hand suddenly thrust itself out at her from between the bars of one of the cells and one voice rose above a rush of quiet whispers: "You! Lady! I beg your help, please!"

She moved toward the voice, helpless to do anything else, and took the hand as it grasped at her desperately. Its twin joined and they clutched hers between them.

The speaker was a tall man, as tall as Minsc with features that spoke of distant lands. He might have been handsome once with a strong jawline and a dark, deep-set eyes, but his face and much of what she could see of his body was covered in poorly healed scars. He had a dark beard and long hair and while he obviously did not bathe, there was a meticulousness to his appearance, from the lack of dirt beneath his nails to the tight braids his hair and beard were tied into.

"These men were our guards and killing them brings no small amount of joy," he said. "But this solves only a fraction of our problems while these bars yet stand. Please, aid us."

"You are no ordinary slaves," she murmured. She examined his hands and the latticework off calluses and scars that lined their backs and palms. "Your scars…"

The man shook his head. "I am Hendak. I consider myself the leader of these men; responsible for their care and training them when I can and keeping their spirits up. We are the 'entertainment' of this foul place, you see—pit fighters. Lehtinan, the Hells take him, buys and sells us at his whim and throws us at one another or at his beast master's pets for the amusement of his fat patrons to fill his purse."

Valla was too stunned to properly react, her eyes sweeping the cell and then down the corridor, taking inventory of the other doors and counting them. Three here. There must have been holdings elsewhere. "How long have you been here?"

Hendak gestured behind him. "Some of these men are no more than boys and have been here for only days. They have not yet seen their first fight. I have been here for almost thirteen years."

"Uh, Vee? Vee, you gotta see this…"

Valla glanced back toward Jan, who was peering into another cell with Gertie hefted onto one shoulder. She looked apologetically to Hendak and pulled her hand free from his. He nodded and waved her on.

She crossed the aisle to Jan's side, to the cell door he stood in front of, and looked inside. Her breath left her in a ragged gasp. There were a half dozen children, huddled together in the corner, dirty and dressed in rags. Their eyes were huge with fear and they were pressed close to the wall and each other as if trying to hide from the door or vanish altogether into the floor.

"I got nieces and nephews their age," Jan said quietly. "Well, relatively speaking, gnomish-to-human aging taken into account…"

From his cell, Hendak spoke up: "There are passageways that run under the streets—that is how they move slaves through the city without alerting the guards. But there is a building in particular across the way from here, a house built from a boat, where more slaves are held. And more children."

Valla felt heat and anger coiling in her stomach like a bed of vipers. "What happens to them? Why children?"

"If they're lucky, they become household servants," Hendak replied. "If they aren't, they're usually sold as concubines or prostitutes. The same happens to the women."

Valla turned away from the children's cell to face Hendak again. "Where's the key? Who has it?"

He straightened. "The beast keeper," he said quickly. "But he would no doubt throw his pets at you if you chose to stand against him. Are you willing to do this?"

In the distance, there was the sound of hurried shouts, from the hall they had come from—distress and concern and then panic rising above the two. Someone had, apparently found the first body she and Jan had left in their wake. The first guard had been young, inexperienced, and had rushed them without a word and with his sword drawn. It had been what had driven them onward, to explore more of the Copper Coronet's mysterious back rooms…

"We'll find him later, it's Plan B for now. Jan, can you do something with the hinges or the lock?"

"It will be handled with skill and care, if not brevity."

"Shoot for brevity."

"Gotcha."

The gnome unslung one of his many packs from his shoulder and began to rifle through it as Valla turned her short sword to offer Hendak the grip through the bars. "Come out swinging," she said.

He admired the weapon briefly, sweeping two fingers along the meticulously sharpened and gleaming edge. It was nothing special—a simple short sword that was forged with nary an enchantment—but it was doubtlessly better than anything he had ever fought with in the pits.

Valla dropped a heavier scabbard from her shoulder and withdrew the familiar bastard sword from it and felt the enchantments awaken at the familiar presence of blood it recognized.

The weapon had always seemed so much bigger in Sarevok's hands. Or maybe it had simply seemed so much more threatening since he wielded it with such finesse and skill. Or maybe it was simply because it had been the blade that cut down Gorion.

In her own hands, it was another sword. One too long for her preferences, certainly too long for combat in such close quarters as these.

Jan glanced up from two vials he was mixing together. "Vee?"

She had planted the tip of the Chaos Blade into the dirt between the flagstones of the floor and then leant the pommel and hilt against the door, propping it upright. "Almost there, Jan?"

"Hm? Yes, yes, but what are _you_ doing?"

"Bolting the door."

"That doesn't seem like a sound technique."

"It'll hold, Jan. Now, the lock."

"I don't know about you, but I was always told to never rush a man mixing volatile compounds," he answered rather testily as he stood and lifted one of the vials to the lock. He looked to Hendak and the other slaves. With his goggles in place, his eyes were enlarged to five times their size and blinking at them owlishly. "Jan Jansen Incorporated, related entities, parties, and holdings are not responsible for any loss off limb, life, or personal whatsit—"

"Jan!"

"Nothing succeeds like excess!" And with that he dumped a bit of the vial over each of the hinges, stretching to reach the top first and then working down.

There were sparks of the compounds reacting to the iron and Valla pulled Jan back when the metal seemed to melt back into a state of molten hotness and begin dripping.

Hendak possessed no such caution and threw himself at the bars, throwing the door aside in a bull's rush. A shout went up among the gladiators in a chorus of languages.

The door to the slave den suddenly gave a heave as if under assault by a pair of heavy shoulders from the other side. But, as if fortified by mortar and brick, the sword did not yield and the door held.

"Now, _that_ is rather neat…" Jan said, wagging a finger in the direction of the sword, his expression one of keen interest.

Valla ignored him and looked to Hendak, whose face was practically glowing as he stood before her. "Guards first, beast master later. Hopefully he'll surrender if Lehtinan is dead and he's outnumbered. We'll come back to the children. They may be safer in their cells for now."

The other gladiators were busy stripping the fallen guards of their weapons and another went to the children's cell to reassure them in a gentle, sibilant tongue she didn't recognize.

"Let us begin then," Hendak said.

Valla nodded and looked to the door. She listened to the men on the other side and waited for the shuffling of their feet as they moved away from it to give it another run. Then, she stretched out her hand.

The Chaos Blade leapt to her palm at once, as if alive with a spirit of its own. Without the blade magically barring the door anymore, it gave way under the next assault and the two guards who had been using themselves as battering rams, tumbled inside and fell immediately to the floor.

The guards who followed them were less fortunate and instantly blinded by a flasher launched at them by Jan and then set on by the gladiators. Hendak charged passed. He cut down two men as he went with graceful, clean arcs of his blade, but his mind was obviously set on another target altogether.

"Let's make sure we get some good seats!" Jan said in a rush, offhandedly taking out a kneecap with a regular bolt and downing the guard without looking at his target. "We don't want to miss the old boy's final performance!"

Valla nodded. It was probably for the best anyway. Lehtinan seemed like the sort to call upon some kind of unfair advantage anyway and Hendak deserved a chance to pulp the eel's head against the bar without anyone inferring.

The front of the Coronet was, by the time they waded their way there, in chaos. There were a handful of guards attempting to wrangle order, but they were being fought off by those of the regulars who were well-armed enough to fight. There was a particularly feral looking dwarf who seemed to be having a delightful time fending off two of them from atop one of the tables using two tankards as improvised melee weapons, even though he had a perfectly serviceable axe at his side.

"Get him!" Lehtinan's voice was shrill with panic and his eyes wide and white with fear as Hendak stalked toward him.

The guards that flanked him, didn't make a move.

"What are you doing just standing there?" the man shrieked. "Take him down! What do I pay you for?"

The stairs up to the second floor stopped briefly at a platform that looked out over the Coronet's barroom before continuing upward. It was from there that Valla and Jan watched the proceedings.

"They have watched me fight for too long," Hendak told Lehtinan, his shoulders rounded and his stance that of a wild beast stalking prey. "You don't pay them enough to throw their lives away at my feet. Come, fight me. In death, at least, prove yourself more of a man than you have ever been in life."

It was over in a matter of seconds.

At the taunt, Lehtinan lunged and took a wild swing. Hendak caught the slave-driver's wrist, stopping his swing mid-arc, and then drove his sword through his belly with such force he hilted the blade. He withdrew the blade and with it came a spill of blood.

Lehtinan crumpled to the floor with a gurgle.

A roar went up in the barroom. Either this was the final fight to sate the blood lust of even the most depraved patron of the pit fights or Lehtinan had been hated by more than merely the slaves he kept.

Valla was willing to bet it was merely the latter.

Hendak turned and his eyes alighted upon them immediately. He saluted with his weapon. "We will take this bar for our compensation," he said. "We owe you a debt greater than what could be paid in gold, Lady, but I am sure that this wretch has some things in his possession that might serve you well. As for the others—"

"If you can be patient, I think I know a few people who will be willing to help make certain the other compound here in the slums is put out of service," Valla cut in. "I might also know what to do with the children."

"They will be cared for properly? Orphanages are often fronts for the trade and I would not want them to end up where they began."

"They will be well taken care of, Hendak. I promise."

* * *

Clearing the slavers out of the warehouse—an old ship that had once been dry-docked for repairs there but then had never been moved and then became a part of the architectures around it—was relatively easy with the others on hand. It was all the easier still with the handful of Order clerics and squires that tagged along. With actual proof of something afoot—real proof and children in trouble no less—the Prelate could act outright without seeking counsel elsewhere.

It was fortunate that the fight itself was so easy, really.

Everything afterward, was not.

The children, nearly twenty in all, were almost feral and spoke little to no common. So the process of bathing them, checking them for diseases and lice, and then dressing them, proved a chore tantamount to wrestling pit vipers.

"They did not react to any of the dialects or tongues common to Amn, Tethyr, or the North," Jaheira said as the party convened together around the Coronet's bar sometime in the early evening. "Or Elvish, for that matter."

The kegs were opened and the atmosphere of the tavern had changed entirely with the hands that held its reins. An oppressiveness had been lifted from it. There existed a liveliness in the air now that there had not been before. Local musicians played instruments in the corner, the serving girls were practically dancing to the tables, and the coin exchanged hands happily.

"And none of them spoke a lick of Gnim," Jan put in. "They liked it though. Giggled like mad when I described Gertie's specs to them and went into detail about the exact color of the sky at noon on partly cloudy days."

Yoshimo chuckled and clapped the gnome on the shoulder. Sobering, he looked to Valla. "They did not seem familiar with any dialect of Kozakura or Wa. Granted, I do not speak them all, but there is too much overlap to not have at least drawn some reaction, yes?"

Valla smiled at them. "Thanks," she said. "Edwin said that he might take a shot at it."

Jaheira choked on her next sip of her drink and coughed. "_Our_ Edwin? Not that I would ever oppose attempts to socialize the wizard-child, but is that a good idea?"

She shrugged. "Thay is famous for magic and slave trading. They might be from his part of the world. If they recognize something of Mulhorandi, Thayan, or some other dialect from that area, we'll at least know where they originated from. I just told him not to wear his robes."

The Harper's lips pursed. "We… we will most likely never be able to send them home. If they have families, they are either dead or the children were unwanted—perhaps they were even sold into the trade by them."

Valla nodded, her shoulders curling a little. "I know. It will just be easier to place them here if we know what language they _do_ speak."

"Speaking of which," Yoshimo butted in, "the Slums seems to have no shortage of such children scurrying about. If there was some place better to be, would they not be there?"

"As a local, those kids have families, believe me. None of them live in the best of conditions, but they won't sell them off to Thayans for a few extra coins," Jan replied. "Besides, 'better' is all about perspective. Better means different and for the kids who have lived on the streets their whole lives, different isn't something you can trust."

The bounty hunter smiled. "And there are those who would say that all of us gutterkin think the same, hm?"

The gnome laughed and raised his drink in agreement.

Jaheira shook her head at the pair and looked to Valla. "You were thinking of appealing to the churches," she guessed.

Valla nodded. "It won't be a luxurious existence," she said. "But they'll be taught common and to read and write as well some basic trade skill or another. At any rate, they'll be safe."

The druid hummed thoughtfully and then eventually consented with a nod. "You might be right. At least they won't fall back into the hands of the slave trade if they live among those of the churches—one of the Triad or Lathander perhaps."

Valla nodded again, but her attention had begun to wander.

The hairs on the back of her neck were standing on end and there was an awareness that she couldn't shake. It was clear that there were eyes on her, but there was something more to it, a feeling that played along her spine like fingertips made of breathy whispers.

"I need to stretch my legs. Call, if you need anything."

Jaheira touched her arm as she passed. "Be careful."

"Always."

* * *

Amn was in the thick of its spring, so the nights were pleasant. However, in the Slums, the air was a sharp contrast to the air of the Temple District. Outside the Coronet, it was thick and sour, filled with the smell of refuse and waste with the calls for alms from the beggars and the solicitations of whores echoing from the alleyways and side streets.

She was not outside for five minutes before she was joined by another.

"I could not help but notice you at the bar. I think… yes, I could mostly definitely make use of your help."

The man was tall and cat-like in his movements and his build, being lean and wiry from head to foot. He walked with soundless, dancer's steps and when Valla turned to address him beneath the light of the single street lamp outside the Coronet, he bowed to her with the grace of a courtier. But his face was hidden beneath his hood.

"I felt your eyes," she said and she let her hands settle over the dagger at her hip. She had let Hendak keep her short sword. They were in no short supply and they certainly weren't expensive. Besides, it seemed only right to let him keep the sword he had slayed his slaver with as a sort of prize. "Who are you?"

"Do you have need to be so cautious, pretty bird?"

Valla couldn't distinguish his accent and she had heard everything from the Moonshaes to Edwin's especially thick Thayan-Mulhorandi when he was in a real snit. Yoshimo helped complete her catalogue somewhat. "It isn't that I'm not accustomed to being approached for jobs, but let me give you a rundown: I have a very well-founded fear of assassins, I have recently escaped imprisonment and torture not a week past, my sister has been spirited away to the gods only know where, and I just today turned a fairly large slave establishment over on its ear, freed their captives, killed their guards, and deposed their leaders. Forgive me if I seem… cautious."

The head and hood tipped. "I seem to have stumbled on someone with troubles as intriguing as my own. I didn't expect that of a Prime. But, proper introductions first." He raised his hand and swept back his hood. "I am Haer'Dalis. A friend. Or a friend-to-be. At the very least, I am not a threat. Not to you, at least, lovely one. I am an actor, a part of a troupe that has been performing in the city for the Five Flagons."

The awareness was present again and this man was most certainly the cause. She could not think of another way to describe it. Uneasy was hardly the word. No, it was as if it was entirely impossible for her to ignore his presence. He made her senses itch.

His race was distinctly implacable, though his face was handsome; narrow and angular with unique and striking features. His eyes were sparkling, bottomless black, and his hair was a thick fall of dark blue, with sections that were wrapped and beaded near the ends. His ears were elven in shape, but heavily pierced with gold rings and studs and what was almost certainly a hollow ring—all a strictly non-elven thing she noted—and his cheeks each bore a raised, pinkish stripe that looked something like a scar or brand. There were four others on the underside of his chin that curled upward toward his lips.

His clothes were strange to her and she couldn't place their style of pulls and folds, but they seemed designed to allow free movement and he carried a scabbard at each side—so he was fighter to be certain. The trousers were a deep emerald and his gambeson was the color of snow under what looked like another shirt of mail of some kind. At a second glance, she saw that it was a hauberk of black scales that gleamed with undertones of blue and green in the light.

Haer'Dalis permitted her inspection without a word and perused her form in kind. She wondered at what he saw, but then batted away the shrieks of her vanity and self-conscious second-guessing. Such things didn't matter as they once did.

"Dare I ask what you needed from me?" Valla wondered aloud at some length.

A frown pulled at his lips. "Yes, to the point. Something of rather vital importance—a matter of life and death, to be honest—has been stolen from my comrades and I. It was stolen from us and we need help reacquiring it."

She raised an eyebrow. "And what would this _something_ be?"

"A gem."

Something in that rang hollow. A _gem_ was a matter of life and death? "Friend, this is the City of Coin, so it is naturally a den of thieves and crooks as well," Valla replied. "Was this gem really stolen from you? Or are you merely looking for someone to steal it _for_ you? Do not play me. I speak plainly and I prefer to be spoken plainly to."

The man looked quite surprised by this, though not offended in anyway. He weighed his answer carefully for a long moment. Then he seemed to give up on something. "How familiar are you with the concept of planar travel?"

Valla blinked and he stared at her bluntly, awaiting her response, and looking for all the world as if he anticipated the worst.

It might have been Firebead who had once tried to explain the concept of the planes to her and how some humans in some parts of the world couldn't even rightly be called native to Toril because they had been transplanted from another plane altogether. As a child, it had seemed more fantastic than magic.

"I am not," she said. "But I know that it is possible. For wizards and the like."

He nodded. "Good enough," he said. "What I seek is a planar gem. The Troupe needs it to open a conduit through the planes to continue our journey. We are hunted—I will explain it in no greater detail than that lest you become too entrenched in our troubles. The man who holds this gem is a wizard. To him it is a curiosity, something to be studied and examined and when that fails he will break it into many pieces and examine it even more, which will do him no good. You simply can make use of such an artifact or you cannot. To him it will always simply be an exceptionally curious gem he will never be able to make use of and to us it is the difference between living another day or being stranded here planes away from our home."

Valla was not Imoen and not filled with her insatiable curiosity, but she could deny her own. Extra-planar origins certainly explained the unique qualities of his features and the oddness of his clothing. But knowing that this was ultimately about a job made her all the more aware of how tired she was from the day of fighting and further exhausted by the prospect of more.

"I worry also for a friend," he went on sorrowfully. "She went to retrieve the gem more than two days past and she has not returned. We are… not a breed common to the Prime. Since the wizard collects all such extra-planar curiosities, I worry she might have joined his collection—a grizzly fate indeed."

Valla eyed him. Obviously, it had seemed like she might say 'no'. Casually mentioning a missing friend was meant to secure her pity.

Which, of course, it did.

She sighed. "Fine. But if we're dealing with a wizard, we'll need a few more friends for this, I think. Let's go back inside."

"Brilliant!" he cheered. "But please, first, tell me your name. Or am I to choose one? Oh! I have just—"

"Valla. My name is Valla."

* * *

Haer'Dalis was enthralled.

For quite some time he had been contemplating hiring the volatile and foul-smelling dwarf that had been working up a tab at the bar all day, because he certainly seemed at least _willing_ to fight. Not everyone could lay claim to the ability to use tankards as improvised weapons.

The outburst of violence had been an unexpected turn of events. He had been careful to not get involved and found a hidden place to watch it from as soon as it had begun, just in case the guard got involved, they sniffed out his heritage, and he found himself implicated by proxy and blood. It was better to be safe than unable to help Raelis.

And that was when she appeared.

Even before the violence settled, everyone seemed to part ways to make a path for her to walk. And he didn't think it was just the impressive sword she carried over her shoulder. It certainly wasn't the gnome that scampered at her heels. No, it was the layers to her presence that she wore like a cloak that made her seem larger and more fearsome than a woman of similar bearing might have been otherwise.

Haer'Dalis might have cursed such luck that the one such person in this city that seemed competent enough to aid him and the others of the Troupe in collecting the planar gem was also someone so fascinating. After all, it never worked out _well_ to mix such curiosity with work. But then he had never been one to play on the side of caution either, so he was not about to walk away.

Now, if only he could put a finger on _why_ she fascinated him so.

He could have picked her out of a crowd of a thousand people with the way her presence seared itself into his awareness. She was not so much a lit candle flickering in pitch darkness, but a candle that burned with the brightness of a star. It was not an inner purity that bespoke of god-gifted abilities, as he had explored the Temple District and was already familiar with how those energies of this plane conflicted with his infernal blood. It was something else that came from within her. A power that was hers alone.

He had never felt anything like it.

And he, a planewalker! Could no Prime feel this? Or was it a quirk of his own heritage that made her stand out to him so? Or maybe they could in some manner. Even if they could not make sense of it or feel it as he did, they certainly seemed to react to it even if subconsciously.

He imagined her on the streets of Sigil and wondered if her presence would cut a path through the chaos there as she did here or if it would just draw every demon and devil down upon her like Dustmen to a corpse.

Back inside the tavern—and, oh, did such a seedy and ale-soaked place feel like home on this soil so far from the mapless streets of Sigil—Valla made her way directly back to the bar and the eyes of her friends were all immediately on her. It would have been easy enough for anyone on the outside to tell who lead them by this.

"Another one? Really?" spoke a woman with skin the color coal and features that were fine enough to be a succubus'. Haer'Dalis had not seen her before but she appeared comfortably set among the others. "Was not the gnome enough for a day?"

This critique seemed to be expected. At least, it seemed standard, because Valla did not react to it beyond a simple shrug. Then she gestured to him. "This is Haer'Dalis. He needs help of the sooner the better variety. So, tonight." She looked to Haer'Dalis. "This is… well, not everyone, but a few—our ranger, Minsc and his animal companion Boo. This is our priestess, Viconia. And… Jan."

The gnome raised his head from a diagram he was doodling on the back of a scrap of paper. "Does anyone else smell brimstone?" he wondered.

The others stared at the gnome. Unsure of how else to respond, Valla patted his shoulder. "So, where's Yoshimo?"

Haer'Dalis nearly reacted on her behalf when a man seemed to appear from the mass of the patrons around them and reached for her. After all, it wouldn't do to see her stabbed from behind so early in their venture together. However, when Valla turned to address the offender, she seemed relieved to see him.

But Haer'Dalis met his eyes and did not miss the pointed look aimed at him. It was very likely, he was realizing, that when he had followed the young woman outside to address her, he had been followed in turn.

_Well_ then. Apparently, leader or no, she was still being looked after in some capacity. He understood now the rather looks they had been met with by the others. They had watched him follow her and had been anticipating _something_ with her return. Had they drawn straws or played some other game of chance to decie who would shadow him?

What was it she had said about assassins?

It added another layer of curiosity to the many that already swirled around the girl.

"Where did you go off to?"

The rogue's eyes crinkled and he tapped her nose. "Not far. You have need of me?"

"I do. Minsc, I'll need you too. And Edwin and you Viconia. Wait, where is Edwin? Or Jaheira for that matter? We should tell her where we're going and I figured that _he_ would be down here by now and spending too much money on wine."

Viconia laughed as she rose to her feet. "The waifs proved to be excellent judges of character—one bit him. The druid is tending him now and bearing the brunt of his wailing."

"Oh… maybe I shouldn't ask him to tag along then."

"Nonsense, he will most likely find the chance to set something on fire very relaxing."

* * *

It had not been difficult to find the wizard's hiding place among the twisting tunnels of Athkatla's Underground. Nor was it any real feat to rescue Raelis and the gem from within after dispatching Mekrath, the wizard himself, with just some singed hems to complain of afterward.

The difficulty of it came when they returned to the playhouse.

Thoughts whirled in Haer'Dalis' mind, curiosities nagging him to stay, whispers of obligations and half-formed worries with no footing telling him to go.

Swiftly enough, none of it mattered.

He had just the muggiest memory of watching Valla and the others being thrown off their feet by some gusting spell as he and the Troupe were dragged through the portal to the planar prison. He was touched by Valla's willingness to stand against the bounty hunters for their sake and equally grateful that the Primes had been spared, but those thoughts were drained away when they were enthralled. It was one of the worst parts of having one's will dominated—the gaps. It made telling stories of the events all the more difficult as everything hinged on half-truths and shards of pieced together recollections.

He could not know how long he was in such a state. Time worked differently in such a place as the prison, where it was compressed and stretched all at once.

But he would remember for the rest of his life, however long it was, how it felt to come back to himself. The rush of color and sound, all of it having been so dull and filtered before, was almost too much to take in at once; the rush of its return an ecstasy all its own.

And it was just in time to witness the climax of the chaotic ballet being danced at the prison's center; to see for himself the snarl on Valla's bloodied face as she took the Warden's head.

It was, he would write later as he frantically tried to put his thoughts onto paper before the memories lost their euphoric color and became stale, no small feat to behead a cambion.

It was also what sealed his choice to part ways with Raelis and the Troupe.

He had not seen much of the Prime beyond the walls of the playhouse and nothing of it beyond those of the city. There was exploration yet to be done there. And, when he considered his new comrades-in-arms, there were too many new intrigues yet to explore as well.

A gentle rapping at his door roused him from his frantic scribbling, which had long descended into note-taking and doodles. It was accompanied by a voice: "I hope I'm not disturbing you."

Valla was leaning in the doorway, though he hadn't even heard the handle turn. She was freshly bathed and clothed in a clean shirt and trousers and she carried with her the smell of soap and herbs.

"No," he said and he beckoned her forward. "Come, sit with me. Forgive the mess."

She smiled at his scattered pages covered by his scattered thoughts and, with great care, gathered up a handful of them to clear a space for herself on the bed. Her weight barely seemed to shift the mattress. "Tomorrow we'll relocate to the Order's Headquarters in the Temple District. I wanted to ask you before if that would be a problem, but I didn't want to make a scene of it in front of the others."

He had rather wondered when this would come up. Valla's approach was admirably delicate if straight forward, but Mekrath had been rather ham-fisted in unveiling his nature to the party while he had hoped to approach the topic on his own terms. Which would have been not at all. If he could avoid it. Not that he shied from speaking of himself, but it was just hard to tell with Primes how they'd react to the word "tiefling". "Is this headquarters a church itself?" he asked.

"No, no," she assured. "It's the headquarters of the Most Holy Order of the Radiant Heart—a brotherhood of paladins and clerics and the like, but not a church. Will that be a problem? Being around holy men?"

Haer'Dalis waved it off. "As long as they do not object to my presence, I think I'll suffer nothing worse than some irritated skin."

"I can't tell if you're being serious."

He laughed at that. "Depending on the paladin, I've found that their auras can be rather chafing."

She seemed to consider this with some seriousness. "I've never met a tiefling before. I don't really know anything about them."

He knew well enough when he was being led. "I know they are less frequently born on the Prime, yes. Rather, they less frequently live to adulthood, I suppose. You see, the power of fiend blood does not dilute once it enters a bloodline. It can show itself again at any time, even after many generations have passed. So, sometimes a child is born with fiendish traits—a tiefling—to entirely average parents who had absolutely no idea they had such ancestry." He shrugged and shook his head. "Sadly, they are usually abandoned, if not killed outright. Then, I imagine, the poor lady is made to answer for a misstep she never made. Those that make it to adulthood probably simply try to hide their oddities in less open-minded crowds."

Valla tipped her head to the side. "Oddities? You mean, those that look more like Miss Raelis."

He thought of the playwright's long, curling horns and beautiful, violet skin. "Among other features—tails, claws, fangs. Those born with hooved feet or anything else more exotic would probably be among those killed off in infancy. This world will never know the same beauty of the Planes if it continues this path."

"Mm. What about you? You don't look demonic at all."

Haer'Dalis smiled, wider than necessary to show her his own pronounced canines and how un-elven they were. "I honestly wouldn't know from how near or far my fiendish blood comes—I never knew my parents to ask and they very likely could not tell me. But, yes, occasionally tieflings are born like me and we are lucky, in a way. It is easy to pass ourselves off as an elf among humans or a half-elf among elves. Or so I have found here."

She nodded, but added nothing.

He watched the thoughts play on her face as she turned this information over in her head, letting it steep and soak.

"May I ask you a question now?" he wondered when the moment had stretched too long and he found himself growing anxious with the quiet.

Her eyes lifted quickly to his, as if he had startled her. He would have given much to dive into the whirling depths of her mind and witness the tumultuous eddies and undertows for himself. "What is it?"

Haer'Dalis opened his mouth to begin but then paused, finding himself at a loss for the right words. He measured her again with his eyes, one hand hovering in front of him and making a beckoning motion as if it could bring the thoughts to him by force. In truth, there were too many things to ask. And could he ask? Was there etiquette to consider? He had never really been in this position before—where he felt it necessary to reign himself in with delicacy. How odd.

"You said that someone had been taken from you," he began, settling for the least offensive of all the questions his mind could conjure and not the most pressing of them that nagged at the fore of his thoughts. "And that you had recently been… a captive? Given how easily you seem to liberate others, it is difficult to picture you behind bars, my hound. Will you tell me?"

The eddies and undertows were swirling still, her eyes heavy-lidded and thoughtful as she got lost somewhere far off in her recollections. "Imoen and I were girls together," she offered finally. "She's my sister. In the way that matters."

He nodded. "The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb," he agreed. "Where did you spend your childhood? Not here, I take."

"No, not here. Candlekeep."

Haer'Dalis tipped his head, considering her. "Something in your voice changes when you say that name," he noted.

She lifted an eyebrow, skeptical. "Does it?"

"It does. Will you tell me why?"

She sighed and it spoke of an exhaustion that went deeper than a day's work and had long ago settled into her bones. It was a world weariness that didn't fit the youthfulness of her features. "It is a very long story."

"Nonsense. I have a great fondness for stories. If you will speak, I will listen."

* * *

_Rushed and messy, not a fan. But finished, so there's that._

_We'll get back to the sword thing later, promise._


	7. Balance

"So, how do you feel? I try not to fuss, but call it a consequence of old age."

Valla smiled at Keldorn's gentle self-deprecation. Their pre-dawn walks took them through the streets of the Temple District and near the towering manses that hedged the city's political square.

The group had relocated to their familiar quarters at the Radiant Heart the night before, after taking a day to languish and recover at the Coronet. With them came the children and with _them_ came the difficulties associated with relocating a cart of frightened adolescents with no means of communication. It was all _just_ as much fun as one could expect.

"Better. Or better than I was."

"A good sign. How are you healing overall? You do not look quite as thin as you did when we first met and it's been such a short time. You are even getting your color back." He smiled a bit, his eyes mischievous. "And your hair."

Valla scraped her fingers through the short down on her head and laughed. "Jaheira noted something similar. I seem to recover quickly in general," she said. "It's one of the few things I have to thank my sire for. I guess."

"I suppose anything can be a blessing given the right perspective," he agreed. More hesitantly he went on: "How have…?"

She looked to him and away again. "My mind's been clearer. The worst of it seems to come and go, but I don't know why. What's so different about today than the other night?"

"The taint sensed you were weak."

"Fair enough, but what constitutes weakness? I am healthier today than in the days before, but I'm a far cry from what I was."

Keldorn shrugged. "Your thoughts were scattered and your focus gone, so the taint thought it could take advantage of a perceived hole in your defenses."

"Then the gods forbid I take a blow to the head."

"May the gods forbid that anyway."

She smiled and then gave his arm a gentle nudge. "I have to thank you," she said. "You were a great comfort to me the other night and what you said… it gave me hope."

The old paladin smiled back at her and his pale eyes glittered. "Good."

They walked on for a while, but it did not take her long to note the far-off look in his eyes. His thoughts were somewhere else and, while a fairly solemn person by nature, the frown that began to worry the corners of his mouth was not like him.

"Something's bothering you that doesn't have anything to do with my blood for once," Valla said, reaching out to slip her hand into the crook of his arm. She searched his face. It wasn't as easy to read people now as it had been for her in the past. To a Sunite, everyone was a book, willingly or not. It just took time. But there were yet more signs that gave him away—creases around his eyes that had nothing to do with his age and a storminess that lingered behind the gentle gray-blue that did not belong. "Tell me."

Keldorn glanced at her, in a moment looking exactly as old as he always complained he was. "I do not wish to burden you. You have too many of your own worries."

"Which I burden you with constantly," she argued. "Besides, I asked. Now tell me properly to piss off or just tell me."

He laughed a bit reluctantly at that and spared her another short, considering look, before nodding and taking a breath. "I suppose a Sunite, former or otherwise, is as good as anyone to confide in about this," he said. "It is my wife."

"Is she ill?"

"No, thank the gods. She is just… unhappy. And I do not know what to do to."

Valla frowned at that. Marriage wasn't exactly her forte, given that she hadn't known many married people. Though, she supposed Khalid and Jaheira were as good of an example to follow as anyone. "Do you know why?

The man shook his head. "It is the Order. It has _always_ been the Order. Whether I am away on a front somewhere or here in Athkatla during peacetimes, she is displeased. I was already squired when we married, but I do not think she understood how much of my life and time it would come to take. Maybe it was selfish of me to marry when I knew I heard Torm beckoning me to service."

"If Torm were a jealous god, certainly he would demand a vow of a chastity from his paladins," she argued.

"Aye, that is true. It is the Order that makes it demands, not my Call. Perhaps if I served the church alone, I would not have so much asked of me, but…"

"But you do not say no."

Keldorn sighed. "I cannot. I took these vows of service. But I fear what they are doing to the other promises I have made in my life."

The words were spoken with tired, wrenching weariness.

They had stopped on one of the many bridges over the canals and Valla considered the water slowly worming its way through the channel for a long while, watching the surface sparkle in the first glimpses of the dawn. "How long has it been since you have gone home?" she asked.

His lips twisted. "I would not say overlong," he said. Then he scoffed at himself. "But then I would not even hazard a guess."

"_Keldorn_. You have an estate in this city and you don't know how long it's been since you visited?"

"I _know_."

She scowled at him. "Keldorn. Go _home_."

"Valla—"

The girl grabbed his arm. "Right now," she said firmly. "Go home, kiss your daughters, make love to your wife—just away from the Order, the initiates, the half-mental Bhaalspawn that's been worrying you gray…" She smiled. "I'll tell the Prelate where you've gone and I promise I won't go to pieces without you. If anything comes up, we'll come get you."

He let out a long breath and then nodded. "But let me walk you back to the Headquarters at least."

* * *

"It is what it is what Minsc says it is. The little man does not listen."

"I just can't say I get your meaning. You got arms to crush an Umber Hulk's carapace to powder and you're tryin' to tell me you can't lift that thing? You're putting me on."

"How does one put another on? You would make very sad armor, little man."

In the corner, Viconia, who had been playing witness to the whole affair in silence until then, muffled her snort of amusement against the back of her hand. Clearing her throat, she composed herself and returned to grinding some rare herbals she had acquired after vanishing the night before.

"_That_ is what it takes to make you laugh?" Edwin, in a chair nearby with a book sprawled open in his lap, sounded perplexed more than offended.

The drow waved him off. "You need not sound so _hurt_, wizard. I enjoy every one of your egregious displays of violent idiocy too."

Jan smacked his forehead. Going around another circle with the berserker wasn't going to get him anything but dizzy, so he hopped off the divan and approached Valla's sword, propped innocently in the corner of the sitting room.

When fighting to the front of the Copper Coronet, she had relied mostly on her own fists and proved as adept at dealing pain with her bare hands as with cold steel. That explained why she felt so comfortable leaving the cumbersome blade behind. In close-quarters—the tight back alleys and among crowds—it would be useless, dead weight to hold her back anyway.

This was convenient. It gave him time to experiment because if she thought he had forgotten about her little trick with the door, he hadn't and his curiosity had been nagging him something awful.

He examined the sword first. It was obviously of human make, but even so the craftsmanship was beautiful. He was no dwarf, but he could admire good metalwork when he saw it. The blade was hidden by its sheath, but the hilt was surely indicative of the care that went into the rest of it, with decorative runes laid into the cross-guard and a grip wrapped in some kind of smooth, reddish leather. But the pommel… he recognized that grinning skull from somewhere…

Back to the task at hand, he grabbed at the shoulder strap Valla carried the thing around by—honestly, if that knotty girl could heft the blade in combat, gnome or not, he shouldn't have any trouble just lifting it.

Bracing his feet, he pulled.

The strap and indeed the scabbard itself all moved to obey.

But it was as if the sword was pinned by a magical will.

"When your actions serve only to speak to the _Rashemi's_ powers of observation and understanding, there is some dire weeding of the genetic crop that needs to be done. _Honestly, where does that woman find these idiots?_"

"I knew a Red Wizard once, Eddy. 'Course he was only red because he'd been flayed alive by kobolds after he'd started lecturing them on correct adverb usage when speaking Infernal. Heard he made good stew."

"Was that a threat, gnome?"

Jan did not look away from the sword. "Hm? Of course not. Point is, you can make good stew out of almost anything. Viconia, my succulent, black lotus—"

"If you address me that way again, male, you will be the one flayed."

"Later, dearest, I promise. First, this sword, do you happen to have any words of enlightenment for me?"

The priestess glanced at the blade, the gnome, and then returned to her work. "The simpleton, who could lift you by your ankles and swing you like a flail, has insisted that _he_ cannot lift the blade and yet you persist. In any other, this quality might prove admirable."

To Jan, this must have sounded like express approval to continue trying. Choking up further on the strap than the time before, he gave it another hefty pull.

This time, the blade whirled around in a wild pirouette upon its point—as if with a mind of its own—and crashed into him with the force of a dozen gnomish rock moving machines. Blade and gnome fell to the floor together.

Jan wheezed in a breath that was suddenly knocked out of him. It was like he had gotten kicked by a horse without the vendor-hurdling propulsion. Then after shaking the stars from his eyes, he realized it was the sword, which had landed crosswise atop of his chest and had him pinioned to the ground.

Edwin choked on his wine and pushed his book aside in an attempt to save it from his undignified sputtering.

Viconia nearly bent double over her work table, laughing. "Oh, sometimes life is kind in small ways. Loathed I am to say this, but thank you, gnome. That was most satisfying."

Well, Jan, thought, this was embarrassing. And painful. It was surprising how often those two things coincided.

He wrapped his hands around the scabbard to lift the blade, but he was met with as much success as if he had tried to lift the entire planet of Toril. He tried to displace the blade's weight by lifting one end, but it remained perfectly balanced. He tried to wriggle out from beneath it, but shifting himself beneath the blade's weight at all was impossible because it meant moving the weapon itself.

"Fascinating."

Jan blinked at Haer'Dalis, who had appeared above him. The bard was bent at the waist and peering down at him with a swirl of clinical curiosity and amusement dotting his face.

"Well, I'm glad you're having fun," he huffed. "Now would you mind giving me a hand here, tiefles?"

"I do not think I can," the bard replied lightly.

Nonetheless, he made the attempt.

And he failed.

Even with Jan pushing from below and the tiefling pulling from the strap, the blade did not yield its position.

Haer'Dalis stepped back as if to consider this predicament. Then with utter casualness he stepped up onto the scabbard, balancing on one foot near the blade's tip.

"Now that _is_ interesting!" he crooned when the blade did not tilt, tip, or otherwise budge beneath his added weight. He looked back. "Dear Peacock, come here and stand on the other side."

Edwin looked at the tiefling, offended. "I will not," he said. "And _what_ did you just call me?"

"I approve," Viconia put in with a humor-filled twist of her mouth.

"Thank you, sweet Blackbird."

Below, Jan was coming to the realization that everything he'd heard about tieflings weighing a lot more than they looked—even the skinny ones without all the added interesting bits of tails and horns— was completely true and he resented it. "I hate you. Really."

"_Oh_, er, yes. Apologies." Haer'Dalis hopped to the side with grace and smiled in apology. He addressed the others again. "So, I do not suppose any of you have the answer to this particular riddle?"

Minsc looked up from the delicate task of combing Boo's whiskers. "It is Valla's sword," he answered bluntly. Like they were the idiots.

(To be fair, in a room with a man that was talking to a small rodent as he groomed its whiskers and tended to its tiny feet with the same care a manservant of a great lord tended their master, they _did_ look like the idiots.)

A delicate frown pulled at Haer'Dalis' mouth. "Ah, yes, I understand that, but did she have it enchanted against, perhaps, theft? Or is it magically weighted? What I'm saying is that it seems to defy the understood mechanics of physical space—more-so than your average magical sword. I've never seen anything quite like it. Trust me, this is saying something. Perhaps it—"

"No, I believe the simple one's answer is sufficient," Viconia cut in. Her usual seriousness had returned to her tone and expression, though her manner was casual as she faced the tiefling, still grinding herbs in a mortar with a stone pestle that fit neatly in her palm. "Valla lives a life that is always perched on a precarious ledge. You are both, to us, still outsiders. You do not need to know more—not until Valla decides otherwise."

Jan raised a hand, though not very high since his arm was pinned at a disadvantageous angle for such things. "I hate to argue with you, my finely-boned obsidian goddess, mostly because I'm sure most people who do suffer terribly for it—but you and Wizzles over there aren't exactly _of_ people known to look out for the welfare of others. Especially coltish adventuring types like our Veevee."

"Would it be unsporting to kill him now?" Edwin wondered, his tone flat and humorless as he considered the gnome over tented fingertips and dangerously sharpened nails.

Viconia stayed him with a lifted hand. "The wizard and I have our own reasons for seeing that no harm comes to the child," she said. "Make no mistake, I am willing to _act_ for her benefit. That you do not believe it may simply be to my advantage." She again looked to Haer'Dalis. "When she sees fit, she will tell you everything."

Then the door opened and the subject of their current debate entered.

Giving no indication that anything was amiss, Viconia turned back to her preparation table and Edwin retrieved his book as if he had only then just dropped it. Even Minsc, though it was difficult to tell what exactly of the conversation he understood, simply continued to tend Boo.

Valla seemed to take in the situation before her all in a single sweep of her gaze around the room and did not react. Priestess and wizard behaving themselves, berserker not berserking—it was difficult to ask for much more than that. Everything else was minor and could be easily remedied. Even problems rooted in gnomish curiosity.

"Here you go, Minsc."

The ranger and his hamster were equally delighted by the small hemp sack that was presented to them bearing a golden flower painted on its face. "Look Boo! Valla remembered your sunflower seeds! Many thanks, Valla! You are a great hero this day in the tiny heart of a mighty hamster!"

"Well, that is something then," she answered with a wry smile. She patted the Rashemi on the shoulder and then turned to address the priestess. "Viconia?"

"Yes, abbil?"

She produced another small parcel from her satchel. "I got those herbs you were looking for."

A very smile small graced the drow's face and it held none of the sneering derision or cruel amusement of those from earlier. "Very good. These will do very nicely." She touched the girl's forearm gently and then turned away back to her work.

Valla acknowledged Edwin's presence as she passed behind his chair by letting one hand skate his shoulder and he grunted some answering invective about removing her hand from his person, though it lacked fire.

At last, her attention alighted upon the gnome, who was still pinned to the floor some feet away, and the bard who was observing him.

"So, I don't recall leaving a gnome mashed under my sword when I left it this morning," she said, leaning into Haer'Dalis.

The bard stifled a chuckle and leaned his weight into her as well.

Jan tried to laughed too, but it came out a bit ragged. "Yes, that. You see, it was a bit of an experiment gone wrong really. All well under control…"

"You tried to lift it."

"Well, it isn't easy to put all of the scientific processes of a magical engineer's work into laymen's terms, but, uh, technically speaking, when I attempted to—yes."

She nodded and then extended a hand and made a beckoning motion with her fingers. The sword answered at once. It rotated as it lifted and then rushed to the former paladin across the small space that divided them.

Valla caught the scabbard's strap even though it was the hilt that offered itself to her and she shouldered it, no more burdened by it than any other blade of its size.

Haer'Dalis applauded, ignoring Jan who gasped as he flung himself upright like someone had been holding his head underwater. "Now, explain," the tiefling urged. "I take… hm. I would hedge the bet that this is your now-deceased brother's blade? The one responsible for the woes of your recent past?"

Valla had gone to Jan's side to help him up—less protective of her sword's personal space than the sword was apparently. "The same," she said.

"Did it work the same for him?"

She grimaced. "It's… complicated."

Edwin made a scoffing sound, but added nothing.

The bard was undeterred. "You say this as if the story you told me last night was a simple thing itself—poisoned ore, countries on the verge of bloody conflict, mercenaries employed to muddy the waters, a heroic battle in a forgotten city beneath a city… it alone would have convinced me that the Prime is worth exploring."

"Yes, well, I might have left a few things out."

"Oh? What sorts of things? You can tell this Sparrow anything, dearest Raven."

She laughed. "Raven, is it?" she asked. "Well, I'm afraid story time has to wait. I have to go this morning to speak on the behalf of the children."

"Off to bow and grovel at some sanctimonious fool's feet?" Edwin sniffed. "As much as I might enjoy watching you lower yourself to such groveling, I find the general atmosphere of such places do not agree with me."

"I was going to appeal to the Sunites."

The wizard was on his feet immediately. "On the other hand, you might need someone of my influence and superior linguistic skills to convey the need of the little ones at this time. I will be waiting in the hall—do not dally!"

"Hey! I wanted to—oh, forget it."

Viconia tsked. "Abbil, despite all evidence to the contrary, when it comes to surfacer men it seems that the body has but enough blood for one head," she said. "And I think, where it concerns the wizard, one is considerably smaller and easier to breathe to life than the other."

Valla stifled a laugh and then addressed the others, particularly Haer'Dalis who looked confused by the wizard's sudden, unexplained streak of beneficence. And it must have been trippy—to say the least—to come from a place of _no_ gods to a place where the actions of every mortal were so heavily dictated by the desire to appease or at least not _anger _the deities that ruled them. She had felt her calling so early in life and now, being what she was… well, it was just hard to imagine. "Sune is the goddess of love and beauty," she explained. "Her patrons and her servants are viewed by most as hedonists, so it's a popular rumor that Heartwarders perform their temple duties in the nude."

"_Ah_, tempting indeed," he agreed. "But is it true?"

"_Hah_, of course not. Sunites probably wear more layers of lavish silks than even the vainest wizard. I'll let him figure that out when we get there, though. When he comes back and starts demanding to know where I am, tell him I've gone to take a bath."

* * *

"I dislike the fiend-bred."

Valla began to laugh so hard at this sudden announcement that she forced her and Edwin's progress to a complete halt and used the grip she had upon his elbow to keep herself upright as she pitched forward.

He sneered at her. "You are making a scene," he sniffed.

A scene, yes. It wasn't a scene to be standing in wizard-fearing Athkatla with a man draped in Thayan red or to be a woman without much hair wearing pirate kohl and a hood that shaded most of her face in a country where that countered every intuitive style. At least she had forced herself into real clothing for the temple, if only just leggings and a tunic so fine and light on her skin it almost wasn't there.

Eventually, she told herself, she would need to wear armor again.

"Not as big of a scene as the Promenade nearly collapsing in on itself," she answered instead. "As for your opinion of Haer'Dalis, I can't say it's really _valid_. You don't like _anyone_. Also, is it right to call him a _fiend-bred_? That sounds racist."

"People are suspicious and untrusting of tieflings for good reason," he answered.

"For the same reasons that they're suspicious and untrusting of Thayans? And Drow?"

"If you are trying to make a point about your naïve approach to choosing travelling companions and the blithe trust you throw in our laps, do not bother. I have already noticed."

She rolled her eyes. Trust him to ruin what had been a pretty good morning so far, sword shenanigans aside. Then again, and she hated to admit this kind of thing even to herself, she kept him around for his insight, as obnoxious as they were on the rare occasions they were right. No, he certainly wasn't a good judge of _character_, but he made valid points and his lifetime in Thay made him naturally paranoid and cautious—a stark contrast to herself. She had been raised to see the good in people and seek to help others. Even now that Irenicus had shown her how black a heart could become, it was too easy to put him away in a category by himself. In truth, she still needed Edwin—and Viconia—and the way they saw the world.

"Do you have anything more finite to add? Or is it just _what_ he is? Because I get the same kind of complaints about you three or four times a day and they also almost always include the word 'fiend'."

They must have looked like an odd, suspicious pair—two people in hoods walking so close together and talking so conspiratorially. And one in _Thayan red_. They really needed to fix that.

Edwin's eyes widened. "That _monkey_-brained Rashemi and his shrew and whatever opinions they concoct should have no weight with you! You know well the advantages of having one such as I travel with this group of hayseed mongrels!"

Valla nudged him firmly. "As the hayseed mongrel who holds the purse strings, I'd watch it if you ever want another decent wine for dinner. Also that monkey-brained Rashemi has been fairly cordial concerning all matters _you_." She glanced up at him. "Which I take means that someone else has been courteous concerning Dynaheir's death. Thank you. As much as I appreciate your talents, Edwin, I appreciate it more when you prove yourself capable of the nobility you lay so many claims to."

Edwin coughed and scratched his chin uncomfortably. "Ah yes, well, I… we have discussed already my regrets concerning—no!" His eyes suddenly lit up in realization and he stomped his foot. "Damn you! You are doing it again! Your attempts at flattery will not distract me from the topic at hand! _But they have been noted_." He wheeled her around to face him so that he could make his point clearly. "The tiefling should not be trusted and, for that matter, neither should the gnome. You do _not_ know them and like it or not your current reality is that you can no longer _intuit_ the trustworthiness of individuals."

Valla frowned. "Is this about the thing with the sword this morning?"

Edwin heaved a laborious sigh. "_Yes_, woman! You are fortunate that the drow and I were present when they began to question the simpleton or he would have given everything away."

The woman rolled her eyes. "Dear wizard, for one, I think Minsc understands the importance of not announcing that kind of thing to the world at large. Secondly, if they're going to travel with us, they have a right to know what they are getting involved with."

"The gnome asks too many questions for one who puts up a front of such idiocy and the tiefling is most assuredly some sort of con-man by his very nature. Why would he not sell such information at the first opportunity?"

"Haer'Dalis doesn't seem to be interested in the monetary value of things. He didn't ask for any of the stuff we cleared out of Mekrath's hideaway." She held up a hand when he opened his mouth to argue further. "But if it will put you at ease, oh paranoid one, I won't tell them anything. For now."

"Good girl."

She snorted and pulled his arm to get them walking again. "Honestly, would it matter if they knew the sword was forged with Bhaal's blood? This is just a guess, but I don't think Jan is going to stop bothering me about it just because I caught him fooling about once and I'd really, _really_ rather just answer him."

Edwin rolled his eyes. "There are enough people who would like to relieve your empty head from your horse-shoulders for the glory of their weasel gods or whatever without adding treasure hunters to that list, no?"

"Mm, fair point. Not that they'd be able to take it anywhere."

"Yes, but they don't _know_ that. Now, the temple, if you would please?"

"Okay, but quick question: have you ever observed _me_ performing my nightly rites in the nude?"

* * *

My brother and I, when discussing alignments, described True Neutral once as "if animals are true neutral, why can't that mentality apply to humans?" So a True Neutral person in that sense would be someone who follows a pack mentality, who groups together with others for a greater chance of survival, which effectively puts aside those moral questions of right and wrong and law vs chaos.

That's more how I've always seen Vicky.


	8. Belief

Valla braced herself for entering the temple, for that empty feeling to gnaw at her anew when she had only just begun to grow accustomed to its presence.

But stepping inside the opened, white-washed doors, she felt touched by something—not unlike a blessing—and she breathed, trying to compose herself as it rippled down her spine and through her being.

The temple was beautiful, as could be expected. It was all endless, spotless white marble, from the carefully carved pillars to the sculpted archways they held up that were draped with live, flowering vines. Gold gilding had been painted over the carvings' clothes and features, making them look lifelike and the tiny minatures danced around the pillars in spirals depicting scenes of life and love. Large, lifelike statues littered the halls as well, ladies in elegant dress, knights in armor, lovers passionately embracing…

"_Wretched liars, I will find them and—_"

"Edwin, look at the ceiling."

The wizard stopped just as he was about to descend into what was sure to be a flurry of incomprehensible Thayan cursing to look at her and then glance upward. Then he looked again and his mouth dropped open.

The ceilings arched and stretched up to reach points that formed spires outside. Inside, their surfaces were embedded with thousands of colored crystals and precious gems and in spots where the sun's natural light was allowed to shine through them they cast colored patterns of flowers and winding ivies on the glistening, white floors.

"Good goddess…" he whispered.

Valla smiled and laid her head on his shoulder, making certain to soak in what was a rare instance of Edwin being rendered inarticulate.

It was the simple things in life, she had learned. Unburnt food for dinner, a hot bath, a momentarily silent wizard.

As much as she found herself inclined to like Haer'Dalis and Jan, she was beginning to suspect she would appreciate their moments of silence as well.

"How is it this temple still has a _roof_?" Edwin demanded when he found his tongue again.

Moment over. "What are you talking about?"

He scoffed. "This city is the seat of the Shadow Thieves and the Heartwarders here had the gall to stud their ceiling with precious stones. I realize you Sunites have heads full of unraveled silk and potpourri, but creating such a temptation and then presenting it in the open—I do not need to elaborate, do I?"

"Oh, save your breath," she sighed. "For one, the temple is protected—it's a _temple_. There are blessing and wards embedded into the very stone here. For another… well, it's a house of Sune."

One of Edwin's eyebrows began to tickle his hairline in excruciating skepticism. "And your point would be? Shadow Thieves do not fear the likes of Torm or Tyr or any other power of good. Why would they fear your lady of throw pillows and flower arrangements?"

Valla rolled her eyes. "Would _you_ risk a lifetime of bad sex or impotence just for a few shiny stones?"

He opened his mouth to argue. Then he paused. Then he cringed.

She smiled and tapped his nose with condescending affection. "And that's what the thieves think."

Edwin swatted her hand irritably and glanced back at the ceiling. "Have you been here before?" he wondered. "You seem… unmoved."

What had he expected? Swooning? Fits? Tears? Or was he just asking about the ceiling?

"I plan to sit for a while to enjoy it," she said dismissively. "And no, not here specifically. But I have visited a house of Sune before. You did not come with me to the temple in Baldur's Gate, but everything there was rose marble and crystal and the ceilings were painted with a vision an artist once had of Brightwater. Minsc cried."

"That is no surprise. The same thing can be accomplished by taking his dessert." Edwin followed as he was pulled deeper into the temple, his eyes still roaming the temple's walls and pillars, trying to absorb the details. "How do they afford this nonsense? Does gold rain down on you people on your holy days? _I may convert if she says yes._"

Valla laughed. "A lot of nobility venerate Sune," she explained. "A lot of the _young_ nobility especially. They face marriages arranged by their parents, so they spend a lot of time praying here. And donating."

"What are they praying for? Love or a partner with a palatable appearance?"

"Welcome to Sune's House, good lady and sir. May I offer assistance?"

The cleric was an elderly woman who wore silks of sapphire blue and her curtain of long, snowy hair loose around her shoulders to fall to her waist. She had rounded out with her years, but it was easy to imagine her as shapely and statuesque.

"Are you the High Priestess here?" Valla asked.

The older woman smiled and her gentle eyes—the color of freshly turned soil—warmed as she did so. "I am. My name is Marta. May I be of some service?"

Edwin looked the woman over. "What is the High Priestess of a temple doing serving the common wretch?"

Marta's lips twisted in something akin to wry amusement. "My duty, which is to serve both the noble and the common wretch, sir," she said. She reached out and straightened the collar of his robes with long-fingered, fine-boned hands. "There are many men who would look gaudy in so much of such a color, but you carry it well." She paused and then lifted his chin as if she were examining a prized horse. "And you have wonderful posture. So many mages forget all about such things when they spend hours bent over their books. You'll be grateful later in life, mark me."

Edwin uselessly mouthed a few soundless syllables as he floundered for something biting and acidic to throw back at her. But he found instead that she was too sincere to fault with sarcasm or resentment; her words delivered as they were with the warmth of an affectionate parent. So, instead he shrank and mumbled what was a very, very quiet: "I thank you."

She smiled and smoothed a few more wrinkles out of his robes before her eyes glided over to Valla. "You I know," she said. "Your face has been dancing in my visions for some time." She tipped her head and reached out to tug Valla's hood back just a little as if double-checking herself. She nodded importantly. "Come, let us speak in private."

The High Priestess turned away from them and walked deeper into the temple.

Valla snagged Edwin by the arm, linking hers through it so she could propel him forward at her pace as they followed and keep him near. "Is that a blush?" she whispered.

"How old are you?" he snapped.

She laughed. "Oh, but red looks so good on you."

He elbowed her and she laughed all the harder as she stumbled and dragged him after Marta, who glanced back at them with a crooked smile.

The hallways that branched away from the main sanctuary were not as elaborately beautiful, but they were still filled with paintings and vases of fresh flowers and light. In general, it felt _good_ to be in this place, it smelled good, and it was a feast for the eyes.

"This should suffice."

They stepped through a door into a garden walled-in by a thorny hedge. The flowers that outlined a path to a pair of benches beneath the shade of a tree were nearly bursting with blooms as if enchanted or just extremely pleased with their residence.

"Now, Godchild, give me a name to put to the face I have become so familiar with."

Valla felt Edwin stiffen beside her. "I'm Valla," she said slowly. "You… you know what I am?"

"Of course."

She shifted and glanced at Edwin, but looked quickly back at the priestess. "I guess I shouldn't be surprised that you can tell. I just…"

"You are just surprised that I didn't throw you out of the temple or turn away from you when you came in," Marta said. She smiled. "Sune's kingdom is love. There is power there—if I didn't believe that I wouldn't serve her. But love can change the tides of wars and shape kingdoms." She shrugged as she took a seat on a simple stone bench. "All of us are in the pursuit of it, I think, whether we are seeking a partner in life or just a place of acceptance. And denying someone something as simple as genuine kindness can change our fate."

Edwin rolled his eyes in that way that was so exaggerated Valla could almost hear them making their rounds in their sockets. "_Sunites_. Do you all think so _well_ of everyone? What of those of us who seek power? Do you really believe we all just need a hug now and then?" He scoffed and looked down at Valla. "Do not ever get it in your head that there was anything to be done about Sarevok. You tried to talk to him and he tried to take your head off."

Valla waved him away. "I remember."

The older woman observed the wizard for a moment and then smiled. "When power still leaves you unquenched, you will think on what I have said."

Edwin spluttered. "And what would you—"

Marta raised her hand, silencing him. Looking to Valla, she readdressed the young woman: "You came for something. What was it?"

Valla had a hundred questions to ask, but they were a jumbled heap of thoughts fighting to free themselves. It would have to wait. "I helped to free a den of slaves the other day. Among them were nearly a dozen children. They are being housed now at the Headquarters of the Radiant Heart, but I think weapons frighten them and they do not speak our Common. I was hoping Sune's servants would take them in."

Marta seemed to consider this for a moment and then nodded. "That should not be a problem. We do not see so many squires born in our halls as the churches of the Triad do, so we are not asked to take in so many orphans. We have plenty of space for them and here we can hope our Lady's love will drown out the past." She paused and the shrugged. "I also have a friend in Oghma's temple who may be able to determine what tongue it is they speak and bridge that gap."

Valla let out a long sigh. "That's everything I could hope for."

The priestess nodded. "Good. And I have something for you."

The young woman lifted her head and frowned. "I don't need any services from the temple right now, Sister."

Marta shook her head as she stood and began to draw from her neck one of a dozen slender chains she wore, each a different length. This one reached the center of her breastbone and a single tear-drop shaped gem caged in wire weighed the end. It twirled and glittered in the light as she lifted it. "In my dreams, I saw you wear this," she said. "I do not need a message written in stone to understand that."

The chain, Valla realized as Marta slipped it over her head, was not silver, but mithral. And the gem, white and iridescent, almost seemed to glow from within. "What is it?"

"The popular story is that it and gems like it are the crystal tears of the Sunlord. I cannot say if that's true." Marta shrugged. "What I know is that it protects the wearer from the powers of the undead. A lover gave it to me years ago. And now it's yours."

Valla reached up to touch the stone that glimmered hopefully beside her heart. It twirled upon its chain and cast fractals of splintered, dancing light as it turned one way and then turned back the other. "

The priestess' eyes were soft as she addressed the young woman. "I will arrange for the children to be brought here and settled in by tonight," she said. "If you have need of anything else, simply ask. The temple is never closed."

* * *

"Who is it that you worship?"

Edwin should have probably guessed the question might come up eventually, the waspish, nosy girl. Given a moment of thought, he was surprised it hadn't come up sooner. It was such a _paladinly_ concern after all. Not that Valla had ever been typical of her ilk in any sense.

He glanced at her as they walked. "What brings this on?'

It was late in the afternoon. When they had left the high priestess and retreated back into the sanctuary proper, Valla had chosen a bench and taken a seat without speaking a word to him. It had become rather clear that she intended to do as she said she would earlier—sit and enjoy the temple.

After it had also become clear that his arsenal of nonverbal cues meant to convey his impatience were being politely ignored, he sat down beside her. Well, the mosaics _were_ breathtaking and he was absolutely not going to go back to face the others' and their paranoid sidelong looks, as if he would lift her up by the ankles and dump her into one of the canals for giggles. Tasteless, paranoid monkeys.

"Some combination of curiosity and the fact that we're standing in the Temple District, maybe," she suggested with a crooked smile.

Fair enough. "You have never asked before."

"I have not."

"Why?"

Valla shrugged. "Faith is a personal thing."

"It is."

"And you're a very closed person."

He eyed her. "I can be."

"You _are_," she corrected. "But I like to think that we're friends."

Were they? Gods, was he really friends with a paladin? No, not a paladin any more. Not that it seemed like her Fall had changed her in any significant way. Well, not in a beggar-kicking kind of way, which she could have used, frankly. And even if she were suffering in a way related to her goddess' punishment, he couldn't do anything about that. So, the only thing he could concern himself with, realistically, was her captor to-be scorch-mark.

Ah, yes. Well, that was rather indicative. He glanced at her. He never even got angry for the sake of other Thayans before. Not even… all right, well he had never considered any of his fellow countrymen his friends. They weren't even his colleagues, really. Colleagues were equals, yes? People you wished success for and all that? No, certainly not colleagues. Hells, he didn't even particularly like the thought of that annoying, pink blight on his patience suffering in the Cowled Wizard's death camp, wherever that was. He remembered tutoring her in her first spells—however reluctantly. That was a lot of work to be wasted.

Hrm. Bothersome.

"Edwin?"

"Does it matter?"

Valla's eyebrows lifted, questioning. "Hm?"

Edwin copied her to the best of his ability, though he lacked any means to imitate her deceptive outward appearance of doe-eyed ignorance. "I asked you if it mattered."

"If it did, I would have asked sooner."

A fair counter. "What if it were Cyric or Bane?"

"Bane is dead, my dear."

He sneered at her. "I am aware of this and you know full well what I meant."

She rolled her eyes. "Edwin, I've known from day one you were a Red Wizard—Imoen literally pointed you out and asked what a Thayan was doing so far West. If I was going to let any detail bother me, wouldn't it have been _that_ one? The one that everyone tells me should bother me?" She gave him a pointed look. "Besides, if you were a Cyricist I think we'd have come to blows over that by now. Tell me about the Mulhorandi pantheon. I know those are the gods that are probably most familiar to you."

"Why so many questions _now_?" he demanded.

Valla laughed. "I don't know, because I have you here and we're not traversing the length of the Sword Coast getting our tack nibbled on by gibberlings?"

The wizard heaved a sigh, beleaguered by her curiosity and effervescent mood, wondering if it was the visit to her patron's temple that did it alone or if it was something else. He could still smell the incense or whatever it was that had filled the sparkling halls of Sune's House. Maybe it had been a drug of some sort and she was still high on its effects.

It made some sense to him that such genetics would have a flaw. Immense, physically improbable strength—no resistance to match.

Still, there would be no dissuading her and it could not hurt to educate her.

He eyed her a moment longer, but then began: "Worship is different here. You pick a single god of a dozen and worship them alone. Entire cities are sometimes like the properties of deities here."

"That's not the case with the Mulhorandi?"

Edwin shrugged. "There are clerics—there are always clerics—" He said this with an exasperated roll of his eyes. "But people? A House? You may favor one deity over another for personal reasons, but you will pray to one god for fortune, another for safe travels, a third for wisdom—depending on who has the power over what. In Surthay, it was common to give offerings to Sebethant in exchange for protection from the crocodiles in the marshlands near Lake Mulsantir and then turn around and pray to Osirant in hope of staving off the floods in the autumn."

"And the gods are okay with this?" she asked.

"It is _their_ system and their conflicts are not ours," he argued. "If they wanted it to be otherwise I imagine something would have changed by now. Your gods are the jealous ones."

"Fair enough. Although, I've never actually heard of anyone being smited for praising Tymora one day and then Tyr the next." She considered him a moment. "So, you don't favor anyone?"

During the first days of their acquaintance, Edwin remembered persisting in a rather heavy-handed campaign of not-so subtly disparaging her chosen career, goddess, and the way she conducted herself in general whenever he had the opportunity. She was not an uneducated person, not unattractive, and by no means dull. With the correct application of her skills, she could make her way in the world if she were only willing enough to step on the toes that were in her path rather than, say, tossing a coin into every beggar's dish they passed.

He wasn't sure when _that_ had given away to this comfortably choleric rapport that compelled him to tell her things—the _truth_ no less—but he _did_ know that he blamed her. If he ever found out how she did it he would… well, he would certainly find negotiating with brothel matrons easier, no doubt.

"Azuth," he admitted at last.

Valla frowned, looked away, and looked back. "The… Lord of Spells, right?"

"Indeed."

Her frown softened, pleased that she was right, but then deepened again. "You know, I don't think I've ever met any one of his church."

He shrugged. "You did perhaps and did not know it. His dogma is rather undogmatic, so his followers feel no need to advertise their affiliation. It is rather the appeal. It is also why his church does not organize itself into a secret club dedicated to nosing about in others' affairs, which is convenient as I have a great many more important things to do, like a proper wizard should."

Valla tried to withhold a laugh, but was rather unsuccessful. "Right, well… Azuth, huh?" She looked him over. "Do many Thayans worship Faerun's gods?"

"It is not uncommon—if they think there is something to gain from the conversion. It is also not uncommon for Red Wizards to simply be Faithless."

"That's never made any sense to me."

"No?"

She gave him an incredulous look. "I'm the child of a god, Edwin," she said. "I am literally physical proof—one of a countless number of examples, apparently—of the reality of the divine. It's one thing to be Haer'Dalis and to come from a place where there just _aren't_ gods because of some cosmic rule that there can't be. But Faerun is still recovering, in some aspects, from literally having our gods just not be gods any more. How does Faithlessness make sense when the divine definitely, assuredly exists?"

"You are simplifying a complicated issue. _Unsurprising, really. Once a paladin…_"

"All right then, enlighten me, oh Enlightened One. What are the depths to Faithlessness that I haven't explored?"

Edwin shrugged. "Are they worthy?"

She stopped short and stared at him. Then, as if she couldn't quite believe she had to answer this question, she replied, with no lack of incredulity: "They're _gods_!"

He held up a hand in argument. "Selune and Shar might have existed from the dawn of time among the first dust motes that swirled in the void, but some have been just as mortal as us. Your own dearly departed sire was an assassin before his rise and Cyric was nothing but a lowly, gutter-swilling thief," he argued. "As not one of them is omniscient, they are inherently as capable of mistakes as any mortal and worship is wrenched from the masses with rote and lash to keep them alive."

Valla stared at him, her brows steadily climbing. "Are we still talking about gods or are we talking about Thay now?"

Confounding, exhausting, manipulative woman!

His hand was in his components bag before he realized entirely what he was doing and she reflexively shrieked and shrunk away, shouting: "If you cast something and they take you away I will specifically _not_ save you when I go looking for Imoen!"

Edwin paused. His hand was wrapped around the dust necessary to daze her, which would make it all the easier to push her into one of the canals—because that had been a good idea worthy of consideration— but being bothered by those heel-nipping Cowled nuisances wouldn't be worth the satisfaction.

Instead, he fisted his hands around one of the loosely packed component wads he used for fireballs and threw that at her instead, with no weave or envocation attached.

The appalled, piercing shriek that issued from the woman was easily the best reminder of her former standing and that, at one point not so long ago, _he_ had considered her rather too vain for a life spent on the road.

"Did you just throw bat guano at me? Edwin!"

In contest of physical strength could he never match her. The fact simply stood that he was a wizard and she was the daughter of the bloodiest God of Death to ever reign. However, he had traversed the entire length of the Sword Coast just the year before, a task that called on a certain amount of physical prowess, and quickly killed those who failed to build it. In between he had not had time enough to let himself get too lazy since shacking up with the Shadow Thieves was no time to let one's guard down.

So, in the foot race that ensued, he was rather proud to say that she did not immediately catch him. It's just that when she did—by _cheating_ and grabbing a fistful of his flagging robe and reeling back on it with an excited "HA!"—it was in such a clumsy way that they both went over one of the walls and into a canal.

He made a mental note to kill her for it later.

* * *

The floor was cold.

Valla considered this development and how it contrasted with the fact that she, in no uncertain terms, _knew_ that she was safely in bed.

Which meant that this was a dream and one that she was wholly, consciously aware of.

Carefully, she gathered her strength under her and pushed herself up.

Armor. She paused on her knees and touched a hand to the breastplate that pressed her flat in the front. It was hardened leather and black as if it had been burned or charred. The workmanship was better than anything she could have dreamed on her own and she twisted her brains trying to place it, but it wasn't familiar. This was the armor of a rogue, but even Maevar's gear had not been of this quality.

Valla stood slowly, her attention finally shifting from her own person to her surroundings.

Stone floors and walls that stretched upward toward a single oculus above. White daylight dripped down and finally reached her at the bottom in shafts that splintered around her movements and illuminated every dust mote in the air like snowfall. Absolute, vacuous silence that made her own breathing and heartbeat sound like a roiling sea storm.

No entrances. No windows.

A cage.

She looked up again at the opening above her and thumbed the outside of her thigh, noting the absence of her blades and how the hairs rose on the back of her neck…

Valla froze and looked down at her own hand, as if it were another's all together.

What blades had she expected to find? She carried multiple weapons, but never there in that spot.

She touched her leg and caressed the leathers. Her thumb found the worn patch just there on the outside of the leg as if something had spent a great deal of time rubbing in that same spot—like a favored knife in a sheath on a belt.

But not on _her_ leg.

Valla turned another full circle, sweeping the space again.

Alone.

She needed out.

Approaching a wall, she began to fee along the mortar between the bricks, seeking unevenness or openings that could be used for a handhold.

How she proposed to climb a vertical wall more than three hundred feet, she frankly had no idea. But it was better than this. Falling and shattering her pelvis on the floor was better than—

A sound. Movement. Something sliding against stone, like skin or scales—a whisper that screamed in the dream's chasm of silence.

Valla tensed, her hands pausing their agitated search, the fingertips of her right just hooked over the first decent handhold and her left sprawled flat in search of another. She held her breath and listened.

Nothing.

Her heartbeat raced and she strained to hear over it.

A minute passed in utter motionless.

The blood began to pound in her ears and slowly she let out the breath she had been holding.

A raspy breath in—a death rattle, though she had never heard one for true—and something damp and hot on her neck. It was _there,_ behind her.

Valla's heart exploded into a frantic gallop, barely contained by her ribs, and everything within her roiled in a fickle, uncertain frenzy.

She could run, but there was nowhere to run.

Not here or anywhere, was there?

* * *

I always feel like I have a ton of thoughts to specify but I can never think of them when notes come up. Basically, if you have questions. Ask. I'll answer.

Also, yes. Yes this was mostly filler.


	9. Sick

The dreams chased Valla from her bed.

After listening in the hall and determining that the others were all still undisturbed in their beds, she retreated to the quiet of the sitting room. She opened the windows, took a seat upon the divan, and began to sort her thoughts.

It was easy, she had determined in these last weeks, to go mad. She thought of Sarevok and felt an all too familiar stab of regret.

In the between, during that brief, blissful period of quiet in Baldur's Gate after the fall of the Iron Throne, she had read Sarevok's journals in their entirety. It was only then that the slow descent that Tamoko and those closest to him witnessed up had close became apparent to her as well.

At first, he wrote of dreams and voices that haunted him in the night; of urges he didn't understand. Then, with time and persuasion, he did not try to fight them. The young man who wrote the earliest entries about his lessons, chores, and invectives about an abusive, angry father, became someone else that rambled about dead gods and destinies.

It would have saved her grief, to have not read them; to continue thinking of Sarevok as a madman ruled by bloodlust and power-hunger.

Instead, they were really not so different as that; the innocent and the brute.

What if he had been her brother for true? What if he had been raised in Candlekeep with her and Imoen; with Gorion? Could things have been better? She'd have had a protector and someone to spar with that wasn't Hull or one of the other Watchers between shifts and the taint might not have touched him so deeply.

Or, maybe, it just would have been worse. If the taint had still called him and taken his will, Gorion's death might have been more than just the death of her father, but also a betrayal she couldn't have forgiven.

Valla scrubbed her hands over her face and shook her head to clear it.

Whatever it was madmen did, they probably also sat around pondering the what-ifs of long-dead half-siblings and the less she mirrored their behaviors the better her chances of keeping up appearances of at least looking sane enough to lead a party of heavily armed persons.

"Aha, I thought I heard your step in the hall. It is good to know my senses have not started to play tricks on me."

Valla looked to the voice. Yoshimo in from hall, his dark hair loose around his shoulders, wearing a plain white shirt and trousers, but his feet were bare and he made no sound as he walked. In one hand he carried a dagger, as if he hadn't anticipated danger enough to take his sword but he had not wanted to be caught unarmed.

"I didn't mean to wake you," she said softly, her voice pitched low to keep it from traveling to the other rooms. "I'm sorry."

He waved the apology away and joined her on the divan. "Losing a little sleep here and there is the cost of good hearing," he explained. "And well worth it, I think." He winked, but his mood sobered quickly. "Did something wake you?"

"It was nothing important."

"A dream?"

She looked to him, one eyebrow raised.

Yoshimo shrugged. "I overheard our distinguished healers discussing a variety of cocktails they might persuade you to drink to put an end to your spell of restless nights. I reminded them that they would be heavily drugging the individual who is not just responsible as our pack leader but also one of our most skilled warriors. It would possibly put us—certainly you—in greater danger than your loss of sleep." He looked to her. "And I have heard you speak of dreams, but not of details. Putting together cause and effect is not so hard."

"No, I suppose not."

He hummed at this and scratched his scruffy cheek as he considered something at the far end of the room, beyond her shoulder. "Is there anything to be done?"

She smiled. "Can you make me something other than the child of a murder-god?"

He laughed, but the sound had nothing to do with joy. It was a bitter acknowledgment and resignation; an apology too. "I'm sorry," he added aloud.

"Don't be."

Yoshimo nodded, but still looked troubled.

Though she wouldn't say it—because how could she without giving away how delicate her grasp was on reality?—she was grateful for his interruption. It was easier or her thoughts to tangle themselves up when she was alone.

Valla considered the man beside her. Was he older than her? Maybe. She didn't know anything about people from the East—how they aged or how long they lived. He looked young, around his eyes and when he smiled, but his skin was olive and brown from long exposure to the sun—maybe from too much time on the decks of boats—and his brow had begun to show lines from furrowing. Even the hair at his temples, only visible when the long fringe was pulled back, was beginning to sparkle with its very first hints of silver.

"Are you all right?"

She focused her eyes on his. They watched her closely, calculating. She offered him a small smile and a shrug. "I was thinking."

"Oh?" His smile was always crooked, an effect emphasized by a scar that cut into the corner of his lower lip and the uneven line of his bottom teeth. "Tell me."

"We haven't had a chance to talk much lately, just you and I," she said. "I always wanted to know how one gets in the business of hunting men…"

His brows lifted and his lips quirked a bit, giving away his surprise, but his shrug was casual. "Desperation. Usually for coin," he said at last. His eyes were on hers again, dark and careful. "You were hunted. I have tried not to talk about my profession lest it bring back, _hm_ unsavory memories."

"The men that came for me were assassins," Valla replied. "None of them were desperate. They were just greedy."

Yoshimo hummed and the sound thrummed deeply in his throat. "A starving thief isn't more noble when his belly's full," he said. He looked her and tipped his head. "Greed makes us all the same—pious men and sinner—but not all treasure's gold, neh?"

A fair point. And pragmatic. She smiled a bit despite herself. "Is that wisdom from Kara-tur?"

"Experience," he answered. "For what it is worth…" He watched her for a long moment, as if weighing something and then looked away. "If you are going to spend many nights like this…"

She raised an eyebrow. "Yes?"

Yoshimo shrugged. "I could teach you things. To pass the time."

"You mean thief things?"

He grinned and scratched his cheek uncomfortably. "That is a word with such a dark, heavy-handed meaning…"

"And what would you prefer?"

"I prefer to think of them as practical skills—"

She started laughing before she could stop herself. "Practical? Yes, of course. Reading, writing, lock-picking—very basic."

He pinched her arm in reprimand, but he was smiling regardless. "Come now, think of how much easier it'd be on the law enforcement sort in if they would use the tactics of Bloodscalp and his ilk against him rather than seeing themselves above such things?" He glanced at the knife his held and then suddenly held it out to show her. "A dagger? To you, yes. To a thief? It is everything from a weapon to a door pry to a… method of persuasion." He smiled at her as he traced the hilt against his neck in a meaningful, playful gesture as he held the blade between his fingers, nested in his palm. "Your sister? I remember something mentioned of her breaking the locks on your cages. I take it this was something she learned before she picked up the Art?"

Valla rolled her eyes. "A quiet upbringing and a ceaselessly curious mind isn't a good mix. Eventually they—Imoen, in this case—have to go looking for excitement, even if it means picking it out of someone else's pocket. When we were children, it was my allowance. When we got older, it was the pocket change of every traveler than entered her father's inn. And eventually there was the lock-breaking…"

Yoshimo smiled. "I bet such talents were useful when you traveled."

She couldn't argue. Imoen had quickly acquired a talent for setting snares, which aided their effort toward not dying from an assassin's blade whenever they rested, which prevented them from also dying of exhaustion for fear of their safety. This also meant she had a rather profound talent for finding and disabling them as well, which prevented several bandit-related disasters.

"It would help you too, to know these things," he hedged, nudging her knee with his. "To at least know a trap before you blunder into it. I cannot always go before you."

Valla looked to the rogue beside her, her lips pursed. True. There had been enough close shaves with Imoen crouched over some device or another when she had to yank the girl away to prevent her from being cleaved in half by a hobgoblin. "I'm not keeping you up?"

"One acquires an affinity for all hours in my line of work," he answered with a shrug. "I would rather be occupied in this manner anyway. To know you are… safe. And not bored." He offered another quick smile.

There seemed to be a word he would have preferred to use, but couldn't locate. It didn't matter. The sentiment was honest. It was probably what sold her on the idea of 'lessons'. She sighed. "Why not? If I said no and then I died impaled on some spike trap I'd be really embarrassed."

Yoshimo consoled her with a pat on the leg. "I would never allow such a thing. Go dress. There are many places to begin learning the basics of thieving, but not here and not in your nightclothes."

* * *

Valla learned a few things very quickly. For starters, she realized that she had no basic talent for picking locks. It seemed that there were "havers" and "takers" in the world and she was destined to fit somewhere outside of them. Hopefully comfortably or at least invisibly.

Yoshimo promised they'd work on it anyway. No one mastered such a skill in a night, he had told her cheerfully and he would have attributed any success on her part to blind luck anyway.

It was nice to know that by failing she had somehow succeeded.

However, since the lesson hadn't gotten anywhere that night, he followed it by instructing her how to remove hinges in the quickest manner and gave her pointers for the unconventional use of her smaller armaments for prying purposes. It lacked his dexterous, borderline hypnotic finesse, but if she was good at anything, she had learned, it was breaking things.

Eventually, they retreated to the Promenade and found perches atop the towering arches over the southern gates just before sunrise. Apparently the one thief-y thing she had a good grasp of was climbing. A childhood spent in Candlekeep among its walls and spires, Imoens to chase and tutors to hide from was reason enough to have mastered that much.

It was a good view too and well-worth the effort. Surrounded by the terraced, red stone rises that loomed on every side, the Promenade was enormous. From their vantage point above it, the sprawl of the market and the endless sea of merchant awnings was labyrinthine and a bit awe-inspiring. Anyone could get lost in it.

Their spot also afforded them a good view of just how expansive the damage was from their first confrontation with Irenicus.

The missing wall and the upheaval of earth and stone made Valla feel dizzy.

She thought of the mage and how much he embodied the concepts of power—even his movements, his body itself, rippled with physical grace and prowess—and looking at the destruction he had wrought…

How was she meant to face such a leviathan?

"There are no honest merchants," Yoshimo spoke up, distracting her from her thoughts.

She wondered if he could see her mind wandering. "That hardly seems fair," she argued.

They were eating fruit they had acquired from one of the vendors that was out before sunrise to tend his stall. Valla had wanted some grapes, but they were more expensive than the other fruit available. Reluctantly, she opted for handfuls of cherries and a few peaches.

However, it didn't necessarily surprise her when Yoshimo produced a folded cloth from his pack and contained within were two, heavy clusters of red grapes.

She frowned at him.

He smiled back. "You are in the City of Coin," he said. "Here, there is wealth everywhere and everyone wants a share of it. So, the merchants happily gouge their customers in the name of competition. Anything you sell them they will offer you a quarter of its value for and then they will turn around and charge the buyer three times that." He jerked his head back. "That vendor? I passed his stall yesterday and took note of his offerings for our hamster companion. But you mentioned aloud as we were looking how you craved for grapes, so he thought to charge you too much in hopes that you might pay it."

Valla raised her brows in surprise. "_Oh_."

He popped one of the berries into his mouth and smiled. "So, if it eases your conscience, you may think of this as karma. Had he been honest, he would have his gold. Instead only one of you is happy." He laughed at the disconcerted twist of her lips. "Honestly, I do not know how paladins live under such complicated rules. It is easier to make your own."

She snorted. "Yes, I'm sure it is," she said. "But I'd have you know that Sunites are considered fast and loose where law is concerned."

"Oh?"

Valla made a face. "Sune's realm doesn't have anything to do with order or the truth or the literal law. Her domains are love and beauty—concepts that quite literally don't have rules. So a lot of her paladins and clerics are considered to be more wild than those of the Triad or of Helm. Her church is more about following intuition and what feels right and the Triad are more about regimented order."

Yoshimo was quiet as he considered something while slowly chewing another grape. "I imagine you must all work together beautifully," he concluded after a while.

She answered with an indelicate snort. "In my experience, it was never dull."

He laughed. "So, how does one go about fighting for beauty and love?" he asked. He reclined back against the stone, folding his arms behind his head. "It is easy to imagine clerics of such a church, but warriors…" He trailed off in search of a word.

"Sound fruity?" she asked.

The rogue raised his hands in surrender, as if to say that he wasn't judging anyone for whatever lifestyle choices they made.

Valla smiled. "Don't worry, I've heard everything. Twice." She picked one of the cherries and examined it for spots. "This world is mad. There are people in it capable of horrible things. We've seen them." She bit into it, avoiding the pit. "Then there are other people who work miracles every day. Some are the conduits of the gods' power and some are heroes that die for virtue and don't expect anything. But some just get up and live this impossible life as normally as they can and scrape out an existence with everything against them. They live and fall in love and keep the world going around." She looked over at him and found that he was watching her again with his dark, hawkish eyes. "Mad or not, this life can be beautiful. That's worth fighting for."

Yoshimo's expression softened. He look away, above, at the sky as its color shifted from endless pitch an ever-lightening shade of navy as it grew closer to daybreak. After a while he asked, quietly: "You still believe this?"

Valla looked across the Promenade again and considered the destruction that had cleaved clear through all the levels of its north wall. At once her mind conjured images of the desiccated remains beneath her feet and the shadows that breathed upon her neck…

She banished the thoughts and rubbed her eyes tiredly. "I have to try."

* * *

_"You are not whole."_

_The cage was cold at her back and beneath her and the shift that separated her from indecency was dirty and blood-stained. Though at this point, did decency matter? Did flesh tempt one such as her captor?_

_This cage was located in one of his labs, amidst specimen jars and the sickly smell of foul alchemical experiments. She must have been relocated sometime during her last spell of unconsciousness. She would never dare call it "sleeping"._

_Those eyes, piercing and cold, turned upon her. "What was that, little paladin?"_

_She wasn't sure where this languid contentment had come from. She had been afraid at first; of this place and of him. It had been a cold fear she had never known before. Then she had just been angry and she had tried to escape. Now, this. Had she accepted this as her end? Was she in too much pain? Or had she been drugged?_

_"Your aura… you don't have one."_

_He had been preparing a mixture and paused, letting his hands come to rest flat upon the worktop. His fingers were long and elegant, beautiful one might say if not for the scars that warped his skin, pulling it tight in places and puckering it in others. She wondered if he was scarred elsewhere. If that was why he wore the mask._

_She took his lingering silence as a bid to go on, though his expression was inscrutable, as always. "To see someone's aura is to glimpse their true heart—to know them if you can make sense of the layers. But you are a void. A shell with nothing to fill it."_

_The mage watched her still, unmoving. There was something eerier in his silence than there had ever been in his calm, methodical speech or the dispassionate way he caused pain and measured the results._

_"What happened to you?" she asked._

_He watched her for a moment longer and then returned to his work. "It is not your concern. You need only worry yourself with how you will help me."_

* * *

To remember something significant and still not yet understand its significance was on par with not having remembered it at all and knowing it was yet missing.

The memory hit her sometime during training in the yard—just in time for Minsc to nearly break all of her ribs in a single swing—and after lunch Valla began to search the library. It was a fruitless task. Not knowing what she was looking for meant she did not know what she needed, let alone where to begin when confronted with the shelves of texts.

She flipped uselessly through a few books that outlined the greatest known powers of the priests and Chosen, how some could sense ailments, treacherous intentions, and even demoniacs without casting spells but by just sensing such things in the individuals' aura. There was even a book about magic made to hide auras or obscure them, means of countering them, and objects and spells that made counters useless.

Not for the first time, she was rather glad she hadn't chosen to become a mage. It seemed rather hopeless when everything could be counter-spelled and then the counter-spell could itself be countered. Swords were so much more straight-forward.

The only mention of those beings that had no aura were creatures like undead and certain magical constructs like golems and illusions. There was no way to be sure save for stabbing him and examining what remained, but she was rather positive that Irenicus was more than someone's disfigured Simulacrum running amok.

Frustrated, Valla swatted a particularly useless book off the table.

Her attempt at meager property damage was countered by a swift hand, which caught the volume just as it was becoming airborne, halting its descent. "One would think a youth spent among books would have instilled in you a sense of respect for them."

If Haer'Dalis' was trying to reprimand her, he was undone by the teasing smile playing on his mouth.

"Is it racist to call a tiefling fiend-bred?"

The bard raised an eyebrow. "Given the kind of discrimination tieflings face here and the general nastiness awaiting them and every living creature, race aside, among the Planes, I'd say that name-calling is something of a kiss on the cheek in comparison. Surely that wasn't the answer you were feverishly searching for among these tomes?"

"No, but it occurred to me before and I wanted to ask."

He hmmed and replaced the book among the stack she had piled at her elbow before taking up occupancy of the seat to her left, facing her with his arms spread so his elbows were propped one on the table and one on the chair-back. "So, if this is not about racial epithets, what is it about?"

Valla shook her head. "I remembered something, but it could be nothing. I don't know."

Her head was feeling cluttered again, like there was cotton wadding between all of her thoughts.

"Might I could help? I have, in my journeys, gathered quite a pool of knowledge to draw from." Haer'Dalis tipped his head. "Or perhaps simply venting this trouble to another person will ease the burden from your own mind."

She considered this. It was surely nothing Edwin or Viconia could complain about. And eventually, if Haer'Dalis was going to turn on them as Edwin seemed to think his blood would bid him to do, he would need enough rope to hang himself with. "You know that paladins can sense auras, yes?"

He laughed. The man could have been a Heartwarder as even his laughter sounded musical. "Pretty bird, I am a tiefling. It is my aura that tends to make your brethren in arms nervous."

Valla nodded and forced a smile. Right, stupid question. Stupid cotton. "I don't suppose bards can feel auras can they? With a spell maybe?"

Haer'Dalis shrugged. "I would not know about other musical and magical individuals, but this one can."

"Let me guess, it's a tiefling thing?"

He grinned in that way that revealed his too-large canines. "You have the right of it, my dear. Although, I would not say I am as sensitive to such things as anyone imbued with divine power. My sense is generally limited to an impression of an individual, but I generally cannot glean anything of their depths."

She nodded again. "So, to you, individuals are blurs of a single color?"

"Usually color, yes. Was that how you saw auras?" He rested his chin on an upturned palm and pitched himself over one arm, leaning toward her in interest. "I've heard that they manifest differently for some individuals—in smells and sounds and such. But you could, how should I say—turn it on and off? Me too. That would be fascinating, though. To see the entire world as a wash of colors with no borders to contain them all of the time." He paused, as if musing on this image. Then he looked to her. "I'm sorry, is there a question in all of this?"

Valla had drawn her legs up, her heels hooked upon the edge of her seat. "You have plane-walked. Have you ever met someone without an aura?"

Haer'Dalis blinked, as if the question has struck him right in the nose. Then he sat back, crossing his legs, chewing upon his thumb, his eyes moving here and there beneath heavily furrowed brows as he thought.

After some moments, he lowered his hand from his mouth and looked to her. "I… have not," he conceded and he looked very troubled. "I take it we are not speaking of an automaton? There are such creatures of Sigil. They are constructs, in a manner of speaking, and operate as a hive mind."

"He is not a construct."

Haer'Dalis raised his eyebrows. "He? May I take a guess and assume we are talking of your former captor?"

She nodded.

Any fear that he might pry or ask something that would require her to dance around the answers were abated when he too nodded and then immediately resumed their previous topic of conversation: "Was he undead?"

She waved this off. "Even if he was the most well-preserved lich to ever walk Toril, undead have their own feel."

Haer'Dalis shifted in his seat, piling his long legs into it to accommodate how he turned to face her. "I suppose then," he hedged, "We would have to know what an aura is."

Valla gestured at the books. "Anything from as generic-sounding as the outward expression of the inner self to evidence of something called a living Weave—don't ask, it's not actually a thing." She shrugged. "All that the philosophers seem generally capable of agreeing upon is that living persons have one, some people can manipulate theirs for different purposes, and nobody is the same." She looked at him and then threw one hand up, fingers cast wide as if she was punctuating a missing point.

The bard answered by surreptitiously elbowing the entire stack of books off the table.

* * *

"There can be little doubt then who these people are."

Valla was being prodded at and examined by Jaheira and Viconia was mixing some vile brew or another across the room and giving her measuring stares.

Bjornin offered her no pity and was solely focused on Brus. The street rat had come that morning to notify them of a few jobs he had gotten wind of that might supposedly pay. In the ever busy Headquarters he hadn't stood out to anyone coming or going in the main hall, but the paladin, who had been visiting in their rooms and saw the grubby little toady for himself, had noticed and had begun prying.

"Bjornin, leave off. The less you know the better," Valla said.

"I saw that boy's tattoo—a mark like that on a child no older than ten years!" He scrubbed a hand over his face. "How are the Shadow Thieves involved? How did this happen?"

She sighed and lifted her arms as Jaheira instructed her to. "What we know begins and ends with what our contact offered us," she explained. "If you want to know something more, you'd have to ask someone else. Isn't that how this works? It's all a guy who knows a guy?"

Jaheira, at her side, hummed in agreement. "More or less."

"How do you know he can give you what he offers?" Bjornin pressed. "You might gather all of this money and find that he simply plans to rob you."

"That's a bit needlessly complicated. Also, a really good way to die—using the Shadow Thief name like that," Valla scoffed. "I always got the impression that they were more about being filthy businessmen first and cheating bastards second."

He frowned deeply in disapproval. "Your casual acceptance of this situation is not encouraging."

"There are worse things they could ask me to do to get my sister back."

"Would you do them?"

"Wouldn't you?"

This visibly disgruntled him, but Jaheira spoke before he could. "Unless the Order is withholding some information, we are following the only viable lead," she said.

His lips twisted. "No. The Cowled Ones have no friends among the Order and we have long tried to seek cause to investigate them, but we are supposed to be neutral and as long as Amn lets them run free…" He shook his head in disgust. "I just wish there was another way that did not put you in the path of the Shadow Thieves."

Valla sighed again. "Yes, well, choosy beggars and all that." She looked to Jaheira. "Well?"

The druid let out a gusty breath and shrugged. "You are not sleeping or eating well, but you are recovering, regardless." She looked beyond her charge and met Viconia's eyes. The priestess waved her on and she huffed, her hands on her hips. "You are as fit as you shall ever be if you remain quartered here."

"So, we can start taking real jobs? _Finally_. Tell the others. We'll leave for Trademeet tomorrow."

* * *

_The aura thing is a bit of a needless detour, but I wanted to explore it in text because I did always wonder how someone like Irenicus would feel to a paladin. Evil certainly, but what does soulessness feel like? And how would one even begin to identify that?_


	10. Poisonous

Everything about the night before had been worthy of a headache. It was a storm of last minute preparations; of securing provisions and a reliable means of transport.

Valla hadn't really had time to consider anything else.

"The simple one is talking to the horses—_no doubt instructing them to trample me at the first opportunity_—and the priestess is already complaining that we have to travel in the sun. You would think fifty years on the surface would be time enough for even a drow to adjust to the light of day."

Valla didn't look up from her adjustments and her readjustments.

Her armor was a combination of chain and leather pieces, which Yoshimo had acquired for her and it fit well thanks to the armorer's attention to detail and Jaheira's merciless tightening of laces and fastenings.

And she felt like she was going mad all over again.

She wanted chew her fingers and pull her skin off—confined, she was being _confined_ and weighed down, there was something inside screaming, there were hands on her wrists again—

"_Valla_."

The only hands, as it turned out, were on her shoulders and they belonged to a wizard, but not one she had any reason to fear. Well, not really.

For a mage, Edwin had a surprisingly bracing grip and it was enough to ground her amidst the swirl of her irrational anxieties. They stood together for a moment in silence; Valla attempting to gather her bearings and Edwin assessing her with dark eyes that shadowed by his deep cowl.

"This armor…" she began, her eyes fixed on a clasp on her side.

"You will wear it," he answered with the same bald practicality he addressed most everything. "The road is filled with more dangers than your average tavern brawl and it has been luck alone that has kept you safe thus far."

His hands fell back to his sides, slowly, as if he didn't quite trust her to remain standing once he released her; like she might float away if he let go.

She felt she might.

Valla twisted her head from one side to the other and rolled her shoulders. It was probably stupid to show this kind of vulnerability to a Thayan—that sounded like the kind of thing the Prelate or even Keldorn might tell her—but she had long ago stopped really thinking of Edwin like that. Besides, she couldn't think now anyway with so much weight bearing down on her and pressing. "Can't you cast something instead?" she asked.

"No."

"Can't or won't?"

"Both." Edwin was frowning at her, but there was something more than annoyance in the way his brow furrowed. "If the casting would fail, for whatever reason, or if I would be otherwise occupied in combat and unable to renew it, you would be engaging enemies unprotected."

_Concern_. He was _worried_ about her.

That by itself was enough to stake her feet firmly to the ground.

Edwin was concerned enough to let it slip through his mask of affected apathy, which meant she was being completely insane, didn't it?

Valla took a breath and let it out.

Nothing _changed_, of course. The armor was still suffocating her and she felt panic lurking at the borders of her thoughts. She just didn't have any other choices, did she?

It was like standing on the Lion's Way again. Alone, she might have picked herself a tree, curled up, and waited for a passing beast to start finishing her off one toe at a time. But Imoen's presence—Imoen's hasty self-exile from the safety of Candlekeep's walls—had made the only way the way forward.

"If I am forced to lead, the ranger will obviously die."

Imoen. Amn. Thayan red and the smell of steel and leather; she braced herself in the present with these things. "Best leave it up to the competent among us then, Edwin."

"Keh, I will leave you as I find you next time."

* * *

There were raised voices outside on the cobbles, which was almost always a sure sign of something good happening, Valla had found.

At the center of the fray were Jaheira, Viconia, and a hooded third figure.

Also, _always_ a good thing.

"We have been delayed too long in this sore of a city as it is. You know this already, _elg'caress_," the priestess was saying. "And it is curious that you are so cautious with the child's safety until it comes to these others you skulk about for. If another of us were to propose dragging her off to introduce her to _our_ colleagues you would become quite violent indeed."

"The Harpers are not—" The hooded figure was promptly cut off.

"Silence, male! Until your input is requested, hold your tongue, or it will be _taken_ from you."

Valla glanced at Edwin.

He shrugged. "I see no reason to intervene."

No, of course he didn't, but then he also wouldn't have to take part in the inevitable separating of hands from throats if a fight broke out. He'd probably oppose it, in fact, and instead spend the time encouraging the women to relocate to the nearest mud puddle.

"Can I help?"

Viconia and Jaheira turned at the same time to face her, as did the unknown man.

The druid spoke first. "Valla, I know you are eager to leave the city, but something has come up."

Oh yes, just so many good things.

"What something?"

She gestured to the man beside her. "This is Rylock. He is a fellow Harper. There are a handful of others here in the city."

"Ah, so _they_ are who you have been sneaking off at all hours to meet. I suppose I ought to have guessed."

Three heads swiveled about to look at Edwin.

He was examining the state of his finely groomed nails and when he finally noted their stares he returned their scrutinizing looks with a wryly lifted eyebrow. "Your exits at night triggered my wards."

"You warded _my_ room?" Jaheira demanded. "How dare you spy on me? You snake-tongued—!"

"Vanity, vanity! You are, of course, being ridiculous," the wizard scoffed. "I warded _all_ of the rooms at the disposal of our group."

Viconia's brows lifted at this. "Druid, if you will hold him, I will do the cutting."

An ear-splitting whistle halted any creative wizard flaying-related activities that might have followed and Harpers, drow, and wizard looked quickly to the perpetrator. Satisfied with the results, Valla dropped the forefinger and thumb from her mouth and began to calmly refit her gauntlet. "So, what was this about the Harpers?" she asked.

Jaheira glanced at Rylock. "They have offered to help us," she said tentatively. "I have not disclosed all of the details, but I suggest putting off our departure to Trademeet long enough to see them. Rylock has come this morning to inform me that this quarter's leader has returned. His name is Galvarey and I know something of him. We have had disagreements in the past, but I trust the Harpers, as should you."

Valla wasn't sure about that.

Once upon a time, she had thought she could trust the Flaming Fist. Then, she had been extorted by them on the road, watched them manhandle their share of barmaids in Nashkel, and killed that particularly dense bloke to save Viconia.

People also trusted the Iron Throne.

And Elminster being Mystra's Chosen didn't mean Mystra herself micromanaged the affairs of every Harper. One or two were bound to slip through the cracks.

It was enough to seed some doubt.

Valla looked at Viconia. "And from the yelling, I take it that you object?"

The drow's eyes narrowed. "You do not _know_ these people, abbil, no matter who they claim allegiance to," she said with vehemence. "The druid is quick to forget the importance of her own lessons when she speaks of her kind, but I will reiterate_ mine_—trust is for the foolish and the _dead_."

On the other hand, if there were other Harpers in the city that might mean being able to avoid further association with the Shadow Thieves. Sure, Renal Bloodscalp and Gaelan Bayle had been perfectly fair and charming and so on in their dealings, but she knew exactly how far that solicitous attitude could be expected to extend. In the end, this was about Imoen and she needed to consider who was least likely to pull one over on her once she handed them the money and anyone who openly called themselves thieves…

"Not that you will listen—_you never do—_but I too advise caution when dealing with the ones who Harp."

Jaheira sneered at Edwin. "I would think you eager to get inside the walls of Harper compound."

"Oh, quite eager, wench. However, I have no interest in falling victim to their mutant sense of justice on their soil."

Valla, as she mulled over the situation, happened to look at Rylock and watched his tentative, sideways examination of Viconia and the prolonged attention he paid Edwin where his eyes fixed, in particular, on the wizard's robe.

"Staring is rude," she advised.

The man looked at her. He was non-descript himself, human, plainly dressed, wearing nice studded armor. In a crowd, he'd have vanished. "You should be more particular about the company you keep," he said.

The hairs lifted on her neck.

It was one thing when the Prelate had warned her not to trust them. It was another to hear this. It was too much like every reason she had ever thrown someone over the bars in the taverns up north, because of ignorant, errant demands to go back to the Underdark or Thay.

"I am, that's why they're here."

Jaheira's hand came to rest upon Valla's arm, warm and firm. "We do not have to talk long."

Right. Business. It couldn't hurt to see if the Harpers had a better bid than the thieves at least.

"Fine. I still mean to leave for Trademeet today, but we'll just get a later start. The others are waiting at the Crooked Crane with the wagon. We'll let them know the change of plans and then meet you in the hour."

* * *

The Docks smelled of salty sea air and were abuzz with the activity of mid-morning foot traffic and guardsmen. Sailors and toughs loitered about as street kids bolted through the streets out of alleyways.

Keldorn and Valla both walked on the outsides of the group with their swords drawn and resting on their shoulders, the show of blades warning off would-be predators. Edwin and Viconia were kept herded between them while Jaheira led and Haer'Dalis brought up the rear.

"This all worries me greatly."

"Everything worries you, old one."

"Silence yourself, brash one, or I will do it for you."

"Boys."

Edwin snorted something derisive and age-related about Keldorn and, in reprimand, Valla elbowed him.

Keldorn's lips pressed together tightly as he attempted to stifle a smile. He addressed the girl. "I have not heard of a Harper presence in Athkatla. They do not usually hide themselves from the Order."

Jaheira answered instead. "Operating in such proximity to the likes of Bloodscalp and the other Shadow Thieves, they might view the secrecy as a necessity. It is not a slight on the Order, Keldorn."

"No, I did not perceive it as such, but surely they do not think the Order would give away their identities? Certainly, the Order would be another layer of protection."

"The Harpers have no _allies_," Edwin interrupted. "They have tools and sources. Others are only useful to them so long as they _have_ use. It is curiously, _hm_, what is the word? Ah… _Thayan_."

Jaheira pointed out a horse plop. "Speaking of Thay, an opportunity for you to reacquaint yourself with your kith."

Valla felt a tap-tap on her shoulder and turned her head. Haer'Dalis' presence was becoming an ever more familiar pull and tickle at the corner of her senses. "Hm?"

"This may not be the best time to bring this up…" Haer'Dalis sucked in a breath through his nose. "I have a feeling."

"A feeling?" She glanced at the others as they began filing down the seawall stairs. She lowered her voice. "What sort of feeling?"

"Anxiety?" he offered. "But redder."

She wasn't going to guess at what that meant.

"We are here."

The building was quite imposing and was obviously an estate of some kind. The stucco outside was old and cracked and the windows were foggy with dust. Rylock was waiting at the door.

Inside, the story was very different. With the vaulted ceilings and the spotless marble floors, it could have been a temple. A statue of Mystra even stood at the far end in the bow of a double staircase.

Immediately before them, however, waited a group led by a man in heavy plate. He was tallish with a thick build and fair, meticulously groomed hair, but there was something disagreeable about him and his presence. If Keldorn and his manners radiated the opened warmth of a paladin at his best, this man was the sneering, calculating opposite.

Jaheira herself took no obvious pleasure in seeing him. "Galvarey."

"Jaheira, I am glad you could come," he purred. "My sincerest condolences. I was just informed of Khalid's passing." He did not sound at all sincere, though he simpered for effect and offered his hands to take Jaheira's.

She did not accept.

With just a glance at the druid, Valla could tell that this man's apologies weren't even welcomed. She wondered what it was about their past that had left the woman so soured.

Galvarey's lip curled slightly at the rebuffing of his attentions. Then his eyes alighted upon Valla and something in them changed all together. "_Ah_, you must be Jaheira's ward. I have been waiting to meet you." He gestured to the stairs. "Come. Let us speak in private."

Valla felt Haer'Dalis' hand suddenly come to rest upon the center of her back, grasping, a gesture meant to stay her. Jaheira spoke before she could. "You will speak here," the druid said firmly. "I know well what happens to those you drag off into dark corners."

Galvarey raised a single eyebrow. Then he smiled. It was a joyless baring of teeth. "I see. Yes. Fine. This shan't take long at all. Some simple questions for the young woman, then, nothing too difficult. Firstly, Valla, do you know why you're here?"

"Not exactly," Valla said. She glanced at Jaheira. "I had some hope of gaining the Harpers' aid, which I think was also Jaheira's intent."

"Hm, yes. I've heard about your recent... troubles. May I ask, what is your earliest memory?"

She was put off immediatey. Her first memories were of Candlekeep and Gorion; time spent in quiet, household domesticity or study, when he attended all of her lessons himself and kept her corralled in their private rooms. She would have been barely five. Before that? Well, the details were nothing but a blur, but there had been a time before Candlekeep and what she did remember was a sense of confusion and danger. There was never safety prior to the shelter of the great library.

But...

"I don't think that's any of your business," she said at length. Her memories of Gorion were hers to hoard, not for some stranger to sift through.

"Answer the question, if you would please," he instructed in a voice just above a growl.

Armor. He was wearing armor. And the others around him were also dressed for war. It was one thing that she and the others traipsed about dressed as they did because they were, at any given time, expected to kill slavers or hike down to the sewers for a quick tussle with mad wizards. But no one was supposed to know these people were Harpers, so why were they dressed for battle?

"I was raised in Candlekeep. That's all you need know."

Galvarey's lip curled, but he looked satisfied enough. "Yes, I suppose one could expect a certain amount of stubborn resistance from one of your kind," he sniffed. "Tell me, do you feel any particular need for violence?"

He knew.

She felt rather than saw Viconia moving further away, positioning herself deeper in the shadows, and there was the whisper of Edwin's robes rustling as he too sought a more advantageous position with all the casualness a man in Thayan red could muster.

Haer'Dalis' palm still burned the center of her back.

"Violence is a part of our world. We live in a dangerous time."

"So you find violence unavoidable. Interesting, though not unexpected."

"Bastard, you are twisting her words!" The butt of Jaheira's quarterstaff meeting the tile floor echoed in the hall. "I will not let this go on!"

"You can and you will," Galvarey snapped back. "Just one question more and then we will put an end to this for good I think. Your… favorite color? I think that ought to do."

"What has that to do with anything?" Jaheira scoffed.

Edwin's head moved sharply to regard the man and his brows furrowed as if he was making some sort of quick calculation. Then he looked to Valla and their eyes met.

_Lie_, he mouthed.

The wizard's head tilted and the light caught his expression beneath his hood; the imperative look on his face and the tense set of his jaw.

It was important, but she couldn't fathom why.

"Yellow."

"Ha! Yes, of course! The color of sickness and infection."

"And of a daisy and the sun!" Jaheira sneered. "Enough of this farce, Galvarey! This is meaningless!"

"Agreed, her answers are all meaningless to some degree. It has been determined that she is a danger that cannot be left to roam, she cannot help it; it is in her nature to be thus." The man lifted his chin. "She must be contained. Humanely. Imprisonment, I think, will do."

Valla tightened her grip on her sword. "I hope I'll have a cell with a view."

"Not _that_ sort of Imprisonment," Galvarey growled. "Jaheira—"

Three spells went off at once.

First, a growth of vines and tangled grasses punched through the marble of the floor and lashed around the ankles of Galvarey and his party, snaring them.

Secondly, Valla felt an arm brace itself around her middle and then she went blind as a thick cloud of viscous, inky blackness filled the air around both groups

And then a fireball exploded.

It was Haer'Dalis, Valla realized, that had grabbed her. The tiefling then pulled her out of the cloud to the cover of a pillar against the eastern wall. A moment later, they watched Jaheira, dragging Edwin, exit the cloud of black, inky tendrils trailing after them and grasping after their clothes. They found cover at the entrance of the hallway just to the south and were preparing their next spells.

The darkness cleared.

Valla moved instantly, closing in on Galvarey before he could gather his bearings and adjust again to the rapid change of lighting. She shoulder-checked him hard enough to uproot him from the magical vines that had survived Edwin's fireball.

Before she could press the attack, a magical impact seared her through her armor. Springing backwards, she avoided the next three missiles in the volley, and saw the wizard from the corner of her eye preparing for another spell: "Edwin! Keldorn!" Then Galvarey was on her.

She tried to count the bodies as she avoided Galvarey's swings. The archer was dead and so was the elven spellcaster. But there was a rogue missing and she didn't see Rylock anywhere.

A buffing spell hit and she felt protective magic weave itself around her—it smelled earthy, like newly turned soil. Jaheira's casting.

From the corner of her eye, a Dispel and a Remove Magic hit the Harper wizard at the same time and at least one worked because his shield fell. Keldorn lunged for the kill.

"_El_!"

Viconia. Valla didn't get a chance to look as she skated out of Galvarey's reach, but she imagined it was the thief. An unconscious thief, now, given the Command. Then, a dead one, if the dull thunk of a crossbow bolt that followed indicated anything.

Valla ducked and twisted under Galvarey's blade as it cut the air over her and came to her feet behind him. It ended the fight. With one hand gripping her blade at its middle and the other on the hilt, she managed to drive two murder-strokes into the exposed back of the man's skull. She felt the bone cave beneath the weight of the first blow alone.

He fell to the floor in a heap.

A mercy blow would ensure death..

A hit—like Minsc's fist but something even bigger—suddenly took the air out of Valla's lungs and she stumbled.

"Damn it!"

A shield crackled around her smelling of fire and smoke.

Valla glanced to the side and caught a glimpse of Rylock.

A glimpse was all she got before what happened next happened.

She had never had the privilege of watching Haer'Dalis _really_ fight up until that moment, so she didn't have a good measure of the tiefling's skill. But it was in a stunningly casual move that the tiefling grabbed the Harper from behind—moving as quietly as any rogue—and doubled him over backwards. Then he drove one of his swords into the man's chest, rending bone and tissue with what looked like no effort at all. He withdrew it a moment later and discarded the body with a shove.

It was an impressive, terrible sight. Then things started to get blurry.

"I have her, where should I—?"

"Just here, on the floor."

"Harper—!"

"I had no idea what Galvarey intended! I would never let them hurt Valla, as you well know, Thayan! Viconia?"

"Her eyes are dilated and I smell poison. Abbil, be still. Paladin, remove the bolt at my word."

"Leave it, we must go _now_. Handle it after we leave the city."

"What are you—?"

"We have just _slaughtered_ this outlet of Harpers, fool. As lovely as I might find this all, it will be anything _but_ if we are caught here."

"They were going to Imprison her!"

"And if they ask why, what will we say? That she is a daughter of _Bhaal_? _Pfeh_! She will survive a bit of poison, but not the noose. Break off the shaft and cast something to contain the poison. Take care of the rest when we stop for camp—_if_ we stop."

* * *

_"Dare I ask why these others are trying to kill you?"_

_ "I wish I knew." A pause. She had the workings of her old maille down to something of a science, but this half-plate was going to take some getting used to. "Gods, you aren't going to take up that bounty are you? I'll be really put out if I have to try to find another spellcaster as good as you are."_

_ "Your vain attempts at flattery are noted and appreciated, however hollow. And no. I am, of course, above such menial labors and the prize is not worth the work involved."_

_ Valla considered the Thayan on the opposite side of the room. He was not an ideal roommate, but this wasn't about comfort. It was about preventing gory murder and with Minsc and Dynaheir just across the hallway this was really all that would work. She was equally worried about Viconia and Imoen bunking up, but the girl had promised not to annoy the Drow and she trusted that more than she trusted her ability not to annoy the wizard. This proved quite true, since when they had last seen together, the priestess was, rather tolerantly, guiding the fledgling mage through a language lesson._

_ "I wish to simply understand our mutual enemy."_

_ "Mutual enemy?" she asked, working off her gauntlets and then the clasps of her breastplate.  
_

_ "What is this repeating? Yes, mutual enemy. We have been seen together; have killed one of their operatives together. This is not something that can now be undone but to rid ourselves of those responsible. Believe me, this is an ugly inconvenience, to be associated so closely with someone such as you."_

_ "Excuse me, Red Wizard, but you aren't exactly my dream companion."  
_

_ "Hm?" He stroked the opposite jaw with the blade of his finger. "Even though you have admitted to yourself that you would be loathed to lose me?"_

_ Valla snorted as she, lastly, removed her thoroughly gross smelling shirt. Fair enough, she was pretty gross herself. She definitely needed a bath before bed. "You are talking me right out of your one merit, Thayan."_

_ He muttered something in what was either Thayan or Mulhorandi, but soon fell silent. It was a silence that eventually became quite pressing and unusual for someone who enjoyed hearing the sound of his own voice so much._

_ "And for someone who is so inconvenienced by me, you could do less staring when I undress."_

_ "Hold your vanity, Sunite. Mulani men do not engage in carnal activities with cows."_

_ Ouch._

_ Half a dozen equally mean replies about being a spindly and gaunt and a typically cantankerous, self-aggrandizing wizard jumped to mind because him__. She thought to throw in something about him looking like a spider or a praying mantis.  
_

_But she refrained._

_"Well, for all the horrible things I know of Thay, it's a relief to know my honor is safe in your presence."_

_ With that, Valla undid the knot in the band that pressed her breasts flat to her and tossed it atop her discarded shirt. Then she undid the braid of her hair and, stretching her arms back, she combed her fingers through the rust-colored locks. She finished with a shake of her head and bent to search her pack.  
_

_Edwin made some kind of hybrid coughing-choking sound._

_Smiling despite her efforts not to, she retrieved a clean shirt from her pack and shook it out. "This cow is going to dinner. Join us if you wish."_

* * *

When Valla came back to herself she was immediately aware of being outside. Campfire smoke burned in her sinuses, which meant that it was dark already, and when she shifted she felt the rough scrape of a wool blanket against her bare skin.

The bolt.

She moved her arm, but there was no pain. She tried to reach back to feel for a wound, but a hand stayed hers.

"It is gone."

Valla grunted and forced herself up, gathering the blanket close to cover herself as she did so.

The fire cast flickering golden light over Edwin's features, which were no longer hidden in the depths of his cowl. He sat back from where he had been knelt over her, draping an arm over his knee.

"Where are we?" she asked, her mouth dry and sandy

The wizard reached for a water skin resting by him and handed it to her. "We are two days or more from Trademeet,"

She glanced around the camp as she sipped at the water. She could see a spray of white hair visible in the nearby cart and a small, sleeping lump on the other side of the fire, which accounted for Viconia and Jan. Haer'Dalis was asleep in his roll some feet away. Propped against a tree nearby with his sword resting upright between his legs and against one shoulder was Keldorn. Under a tree on the opposite side of the clearing were Minsc and Yoshimo.

Jaheira was nowhere in sight.

"Securing the area. Or so she said."

"She threw the first spell," Valla replied.

"A good cover."

She smiled at his sardonic bitterness. "When Gorion knew the entire world would be trying to kill me, he trusted my life to Khalid and Jaheira. I trusted him. I trust her."

Edwin snorted. "The drow will be disappointed that you have learned nothing."

"Not relying on people can also get you killed. Viconia won't admit it, but she knows that too. So do you."

He made another guttural noise, but said nothing. His dark eyes, nearly black despite the firelight, searched hers. "You are pale."

"I feel fine. Was I poisoned?"

"Yes."

"Hm, my muscles are stiff." She rubbed at her neck for a long moment. Then she looked at Edwin. "Why did you tell me to lie about my favorite color?"

The wizard glanced at her and then at the fire. "No mage there was skilled enough to cast the spell, so they must have intended to use a ritual. Imprisonment is a spell of layers. The prison is not just the cocoon of suspended animation one is kept in beneath the earth, but one of the mind as well. It is a prolonged state of illusion. For one powerful enough to simply cast the spell, it is nothing to create these illusions from whole cloth so that the subject has seemingly lived another life entirely. For someone casting from a ritual, they would need to know a handful of things about the person to be Imprisoned and base them in truth so they relive _memories_."

Realization dawned quickly "That _bastard_," she whispered.

"You did well, avoiding details," Edwin went on. "But from basics, details can be divined. When he asked for your favorite color I realized that he was not inquiring about your heritage, but that his questions had to involve something else. Magic was my first guess."

"Okay, but… my favorite color? What great, illuminating details can be divined from that?"

He shrugged. "Assuming you _did_ lie, what is your favorite color?"

"Red."

"The favored color of Sune's church?"

"Ah, hm, well… _ugh_, fine."

"Also, obviously, prolonged association with an exceptional individual such as—"

She grabbed his face and shoved him over backward into the dirt before he could finish the sentence and then got up to search for a shirt.

* * *

_A murder-stroke is strike delivered with the pommel._

_Holding the blade of a sword with one hand and the hilt with the other and using it as a sort of spear it called half-swording (I did not know you coud verb that noun). I've seen it done with long-swords. My assumption is that it could be done with bastard swords but shrug._

_Watch Edwin Thay it up all over the place._

_Obviously younger!Valla was a much brasher creature than she is at present. I have no explanation for this scene other than wanting to display how different things were when Edwin and Valla first met._


	11. Fear

Valla woke to the sound of the other's arguing.

This wasn't as common as one might think, despite the fact that Jaheira, Viconia, and Edwin got along like three cats with their tails tied together. In fact, their group had a pretty good rhythm, one they had achieved over the course of their prolonged exposure to one another.

A hard-fought battle, to be sure.

These recent dalliances with old habits, Valla thought, were mostly rooted in the new additions to their formula. Keldorn, Haer'Dalis, Jan, and Yoshimo were four wildly different people with their own minds and it would be a while before all the kinks worked out.

Then there was the fact that they were in Amn; a land that was strange to all of them and it made them all tense.

And then there were the other, more obvious reasons too—missing Imoens, mad mages, dead husbands and witches, etc.

So, chafing was to be expected.

Valla listened with one ear as she shuffled over to the smoldering remains of the fire where breakfast was still warm. That she detected a distinct lack of _nature_, she suspected that Yoshimo had cooked. She made a note to kiss the man or at least buy him something nice someday, because she knew that the crunchy bits in Jaheira's stews _weren't_ just undercooked beans and, frankly, a change of pace was refreshing in a way words couldn't quite describe.

"If they are to be travelling with us, they should know the risks—all of them"

"Your Order would gladly see her executed, so forgive me if I find your words somewhat hollow and worthless, paladin. Were it not for your Order's diligent snooping, we would have gladly continued to also keep you and your _brothers_ in the dark, as we did from the start."

"Bite your tongue, wizard. The girl is dear to me, which is why it pains me that she continues keeping _your_ company."

Olive skin and rolling words flushed with anger. "You know _nothing_ of me, old man, and even less of her."

"I know enough. You wear your affiliations for everyone to see whereas the girl has at least tried to walk the path of right."

"As delightful as it might be to see the wizard put to the sword, as it were, we veer from the subject at hand. I might be willing to accept that you care for the child, _jaluk_, but—"

"Willing to accept—? I'll hardly allow my word to be put on trial by the likes of you, priestess!"

Jaheira and Minsc were tending the horses, brushing out their short coats and seeing to their hooves—diligently ignoring the argument and refusing to be pulled in.

Valla understood why.

For Minsc it was probably too confusing. He couldn't agree with anything that might put her in harm's way but anything Edwin was putting forward must be a sneaky kind of evil, right? And Jaheira could always see both sides of an argument and probably found herself unable to pick one over the other this time. It was the altruism of the druid in her that likely agreed with Keldorn, but the Harper—the part that understood subterfuge and waiting out one's quarry—that, maybe ironically, sided with Edwin and Viconia.

Valla surveyed the camp again and spotted Yoshimo playing cards with Haer'Dalis and Jan on the opposite side of the wagon but still in ear shot. If they had anything to add to the topic at hand, they were, perhaps wisely, keeping it to themselves.

Thanks to Irenicus' complete lack of delicacy, Yoshimo already knew well what she was and had seemed to accept it with few problems, though she understood that that had a lot to do with a certain amount of cultural distance. Bhaal wasn't a god in Kara-tur, after all.

"Valla, you cannot possibly continue to go along with this."

Well, nuts. She had been kind of hoping to not get involved either. Thanks, Keldorn.

"Can't I eat first?"

The paladin scowled. "Your responsibilities as the leader of this group take precedence, I'm afraid."

Right. Somehow, leading the group was easier when no one was looking over her shoulder when she did it. She sat aside the pan she had been eating from with as much dignity as one could muster doing so and stood, dusting off her trousers.

Then she turned and raised her voice: "Jan, Haer'Dalis? I'm half-god and occasionally people try to kill me for it. Say nothing if you're okay with that."

It took an hour and one employment of Minsc's all-encompassing "hug of peace" to quell the chaos that ensued from this announcement, which was mostly just a lot of yelling and finger-pointing.

Eventually, however, they did get back on the road. Edwin wasn't speaking to her and Viconia had hit her no less than three times over the course of the sorting that followed, but Valla considered the matter mostly settled. Whatever noses were tweaked or feathers rumpled could be soothed and smoothed out later.

"I didn't really want to draw attention to it given that there were other things at hand earlier, but I do require something of a… primer on what this all means, I'm afraid. If you don't mind, my raven?"

Valla looked to Haer'Dalis. They were side-by-side providing the cart's rearguard. "On what?"

"Who exactly was Bhaal?"

She blinked at him. Then it clicked. "Oh, right. You don't… do the gods thing. Wow, that's… damn. But you have read a lot since you came here, right? You don't recognize the name?"

He shrugged. "It sounds familiar, but there are so many gods, new and old, near and far, that they're difficult to keep straight. And without context?" The tiefling looked rather apologetic. "If it is painful to go over this, I could—"

"No, it's just… well, it was…"

A cataclysm that had put Faerun on the brink of annihilation? Was that too dramatic? How did one convey the enormity of going from having gods to not just _not_ having gods but living among them and having their cosmic wars fought on mortal soil? How could one put that into scope for someone that didn't even really understand the point of _having_ gods?

"Let's go back," she said slowly and a nostalgia for Candlekeep crept upon her.

"How far back?" the bard asked, his brows lifting.

Valla hummed. "Well, way back. To the very first god of the dead and death and all that. It kind of started with him. His name was Jergal. His title was the Lord of the End of Everything."

Haer'Dalis' mouth hung open for a second as he considered this. Then he pursed his lips and shook his head. "I can't lie. That is a most impressive appellation."

"Right? So, there was also the Dead Three—there's a book about this, I'll have to scrape up a copy for you. It goes into their accomplishments and the whole story." She waved her hand to dismiss the thought. "Anyway, that's what they came to be known as. In life, also a very, very long time ago, they were a necromancer, a tyrant, and an assassin—Myrkul, Bane, and Bhaal. Together, they made a pact that they would become gods or die trying."

"Well, one cannot say they did not set lofty goals for themselves. I assume they succeeded."

"They did. Eventually they confronted Jergal on his throne—I don't know if it was the Fugue Plane back then or not? But Jergal didn't want a fight. He was ancient and tired and perfectly content to hand over his godhood. Except…"

The bard raised a hand and finished for her. "There was three of them. Being paragons of character I can only assume this descended into a bloody feud."

"Nearly. But Jergal stopped them and proposed a game of chance." Valla sucked her lip as she thought. "I don't remember really who won the first roll, but I know that Myrkul became the god of the dead, Bane became the god of tyranny, and Bhaal became the god of death."

Haer'Dalis interrupted again. "_The_ dead and death being so different?"

She nodded. "The god of the dead only deals with the souls of the living once they've left their physical bodies here for the Fugue Plane. It's the god of death that deals in their actual manner of departure."

"Ah-ha, I see. So, they achieved godhood. Then?"

"Then they were killed in the Gods War. Hence the Dead Three part."

Haer'Dalis choked and then sputtered indignantly. "What?"

The former paladin started to laugh. "I know, it's quite an anti-climax, but only when you read it like that. The events were hundreds of years apart. But the Gods War? That was just twenty years ago. Something happened—I don't know if anyone on Toril is really clear on what—and all of the gods were punished and made mortal and sent here. To Faerun. All of them. Well, all of Faerun's gods. I'm pretty sure the other pantheons stayed right where they belonged. And not Helm, but that's a different story."

The tiefling's eyes were wide. "That… that sounds amazing," he said and he sounded almost envious.

Valla should have predicted that answer from someone who walked the planes because adventuring itself didn't offer enough excitement. "That isn't really the word for it," she countered slowly. "Without priests or priestesses with the power to cure or heal, there were plagues everywhere and people dying of the simplest injuries because of infection. The gods fought out their rivalries here, so there was war everywhere too. And without gods minding the weather, protecting the harvests, and looking over the forests, things went wild and crops failed. So, plagues, war, and famine. Everywhere." She paused to consider what else she had read of that time. "There are entire cities here that are dedicated to one god usually because that god visited or stayed there during the War. The idea of a god visiting isn't a problem when it's a good god. But then there were gods like Bhaal."

"An unfriendly fellow, your sire?"

She scoffed. "His preferred moniker was the God of Murder. It cuts to the marrow of his character, I think." She pulled at the loose ends of her bracer's lacing. "From what I've read, his cults would invade small villages and hamlets at night and just wipe out the people. Bhaal was usually with them in some monstrous avatar or another and apparently there was blood sacrifice and cannibalism…" She took a breath and then look at the tiefling. "So, the important bit is that he knew he was going to die—a diviner or a seer told him. So, he went about and fathered, supposedly, hundreds of potential mass murderers. Like me. Apparently that kind of productivity is possible when you're a god. And somehow, we're meant to… do something? Continue his legacy or resurrect him? I was never told. Sarevok thought that starting a war and killing enough of our siblings would somehow _make_ him a god, but I don't think Bhaal had any intention of sharing godhood with anyone, not even his children."

Haer'Dalis' brow furrowed and they were walking close together now so their words did not travel. "You sound rather certain of that."

The woman shook her head. "I served a god. No paladin or priest will say this, but no god is perfect. For the most part, they can be just as petty and selfish as mortals. So, basically, none of them would willingly give up being a god. That goes double for the murderous, sociopathic ones." She paused, frowning to herself. "I don't know what got into Jergal. Maybe that makes him better than the gods now. Maybe that should really scare us." She waved a hand. "My point is that whatever Bhaal's plan was and whatever role we're meant to play as his children? It wasn't to put someone _else_ on his throne."

Haer'Dalis said nothing.

For some while, neither of them said anything as they continued to slog behind the wagon, having fallen even further behind during their talk but neither making an effort to catch up.

It was sometime before the tiefling broke the silence. Reaching across the gap between them, he pinched his companion's arm and said: "My raven, if something troubles you, speak."

Valla glanced at the bard and found him watching her from the corner of his eyes.

Viconia would call it naiveté and Edwin would probably say she was acting like a swooning bar wench, but she trusted Haer'Dalis.

Well, trust was probably too strong a word.

She didn't even trust herself these days.

At the very least, though, she believed in his good intentions; believed that he didn't mean her any harm. She didn't think a man like him fought idly _for_ just anyone. That he had killed for her surely said something?

"Does any of this bother you?" she finally asked.

To her surprise, Haer'Dalis looked quite taken aback. He even stopped to stare at her, prompting her to stop as well.

"Pretty bird," he said, his tone holding the gentlest of reprimands as a smile slowly began to creep onto his lips, pulling at the corners. "A tiefling would have to be a terrible hypocrite to sneer at anyone for their blood, of all things. And if you are concerned about the disasters that supposedly follow you, you should keep in mind that tieflings are thought to be bad luck and ill omens. We are, you and I, a matched set."

Valla opened her mouth to argue and then closed it again. "I suppose I didn't think of it like that," she admitted. Then she laughed. "If any of it's true, we might be better off splitting up now."

He grinned and slid an arm around her middle, pulling her along as he began to walk after the wagon again. "But that wouldn't be nearly as much fun."

* * *

It was gray and raining when they arrived in Trademeet.

"Well, this is… unsettling."

And excepting for the terse "welcome" from the guards at the gate that had come joined hand-in-hand with a fight against a pack of dire wolves and an almost immediate warning to leave, there was no one on the streets. No vendors, no people, no children.

"Spooky," Jan agreed blithely, adjusting Gertie's weight and that of his satchels against his back as he stared up the downright mournful looking front of Waukeen's temple. "Where is everyone?"

"Inside, I assume," Valla said warily as she swept the street with her eyes, up and then down.

"Sure, but the vendors too? All the shops are closed. What about the beggars?"

He was right.

The emptiness of the streets, lined with formlorn, unattended market stalls and darkened storefronts, was overwhelming.

Valla caught a flash of movement from the corner of her eye and turned to follow it. A woman, hoarding a bundle and her shawl close to her was walking in the shadow of the eaves to stay dry. "Ma'am?" she called out, taking a step after the figure. "Can we speak?"

A sallow, bony face looked back at them and then a cracked squawk answered: "No! Leave me be, stranger! I ain't got nothing for you!"

There were times, when her blood roared in her ears and bit at her heels, that Valla thought she could smell fear. But she didn't need to smell it then to recognize the terror in the woman's voice or how she tried to disappear into herself as she scuttled off.

Jan shuffled close to her side. "What's going on here?" he asked.

The Bhaalspawn shook her head. "I don't know," she said. "We need to find this High Merchant whoever and speak to him. Looks like Town Hall's this way. Where'd the others get off to?"

She knew but the thought fluttered just short of her grasp…

"They were going to look for the inn. Let's hope it ain't closed like everything else."

Valla nodded and started down the street toward the dignified, if dreary looking estate that towered over every other building around it thanks to the belfry that topped it. At length, she glanced down at her companion. "So…" she hedged, not knowing where to start or even how.

"So, a half-god?" he answered cheerfully. He adjusted his rucksack and crossbow again. "Wouldn't have won that bet."

She smiled despite herself. Well, Edwin was right about one thing at least. Jan wasn't as stupid as he played. "Maybe that's a bit of an overstatement," she said.

"No, no," Jan argued. "If your ma was a mortal and daddy was a god. I think half-wunderkind has to be about the size of it, yeah?" He paused a moment, thoughtful. "So, the sword…?"

Valla thumbed the strap at her shoulder. "It's an… artifact; forged for Bhaal by his cult after he fell to Toril but before his death. During the process, the metal was either mixed with some of his blood or it was cooled _in_ his blood—what I found on the subject wasn't really clear when it came to the details."

The gnome wagged a finger. "I got it, I got it. So, only a Bhaalspawn can pick it up."

"That seems to be the case. Though, it also seems to have a mind of its own sometimes. I would say that sounds crazy, but given what's happened to me in the last year it's easier these days to assume anything is possible until life proves otherwise."

"That's not a bad philosophy to live by." He glanced her way and, seeming to sense some of her swelling melancholy, he nudged her. "This reminds me of the time when I was a god."

Valla had gotten quick to cut him off when she detected that he was winding up for a story, especially when they weren't in the position for distraction. But this particular diatribe into blasphemy she had to hear. "_Go on_…"

"Bane, in fact. Well, an avatar. Well, mistaken for an avatar. This was during the Crisis, so it was an understandable mix-up what with _everyone's_ avatars running around."

Oh, sure. Understandable. But she wondered who exactly this cult had been composed of that they mistook a boggle-eyed gnome for their dread lord of oppression. "Well, I hope we won't have problems. Bane's remaining church isn't crazy about Bhaalspawn from what I hear."

He waved this off. "No, no, we're fine. I mean, the wine and the girls were wonderful, but the begging and the human sacrifices got _so_ tedious…"

* * *

Coprith was a tall, handsome fellow whose face looked too young for the strands of silver that streaked his hair. His eyes were kind and his greeting to them was in wild, stark contrast to the chilly acknowledgment allotted by his guards and every other living person they had encountered thus far in Trademeet: "Greetings travelers, I'm afraid you've come to Trademeet at a… tumultuous time. But I welcome you all the same."

The room itself was warm, though sparsely furnished, and it hardly seemed to suit a man in such a lofty position. There weren't even lamps lit and the only light came from the fire.

Another man sat near the hearth, bowed over a cup of something. His hair was very long and black as pitch save for the ribbon of stark white at his brown, which seemed out of place on a man who looked some years younger than Keldorn yet. His tunic was patched with leather and adorned with beads and dark fur around his collar and his only armor, the leather shin and arm guards he wore, were intricately embroidered with Druidic runes and sigils.

A cloak rested over the back of his chair and for all the world looked like a patch of ground strewn with autumn leaves scooped up and sewn to a swatch of cloth. A staff rested against the nearby wall and looked like many individual branches of a young tree braided together into a single, solid rod. On closer inspection, it appeared yet alive with tiny, leafing sprouts of new growth near the crown.

Valla looked back at the man and found him watching her. There was nothing predatory or unfriendly in his eyes of his posture—quite the opposite as he appeared utterly serene and content at the moment. But when she moved just a step, she could have sworn the angle and the light made his eyes flash, like the glow of an animal's in the dark. Then he looked back down at his drink and it was gone.

"I apologize for the intrusion," she said, glancing around the room and trying to shake what she had seen. "My name is Valla and this is Jan. My group and I heard something of the troubles Trademeet has been facing and we'd like to offer our assistance."

Coprith's brows lifted. "Truly? Waukeen be praised, I don't know what to say."

"Well, if you could explain a little more about what's been happening, that'd help. But first…" Valla took a breath and let it out. She wasn't any good as a mercenary; at holding help for ransom. This was the kind of thing she needed Edwin around for. Shaking people down for their coins in exchange for his magical prowess was, as far as he was concerned, his gods-given right in life. "I need to save a very large sum of money to rescue a friend…"

"Lady, if you are successful in this endeavor, I will see that you are handsomely compensated for your time," Coprith cut in. "We are a wealthy community… we were, at least."

"What has changed?"

He rubbed at his forehead. "Some believe this is a curse, others say it is simply a matter of luck—I know the limits of the former and we have done nothing to turn Bashaba's eye or earn Tymora's spite. It is simply what it is." He took a breath. "Recently a group of Djinn from Calimport have taken residence here. They have cut off our commerce, bribed caravans to trade the solely with them and scared off the rest. Their goods are too expensive for my people to afford and we are starving. I do not know what they want. No one is willing to approach them."

"And if you do it yourself you might get killed, because maybe that's what they want, you don't know," Valla said. "I'll speak them. What about the animal attacks?"

"We don't know," Coprith said. "We think it has something to do with the Druid's Grove nearby, but we have always lived in peace with those of the grove. I tried to contact the grove, but the first messenger I sent never returned. Now, the people here grow restless and I'm afraid they feel needlessly hostile to outsiders—druids in particular."

Valla immediately looked to Jan. "I hope Jaheira's all right…"

The gnome snorted. "I'd worry more about the poor fool that'd try Ja-ja's temper."

Coprith continued. "Actually, your arrival is quite timely. This is Cernd, he is not of this grove but another, and has arrived to offer aid. Given the current climate in Trademeet, he remains sheltered here where he can be safe."

Cernd stood as the room's attention turned upon him.

Valla couldn't help but note the scars that marked his arms or the bulk of thick muscle he carried on his slim form. This was strange for a druid, as far as Valla knew. Jaheira herself carried the heft to seriously menace the skull of any potential threat, because as a Harper she trained her sword arm more regularly than she practiced her casting.

Valla had a hard time imagining this man, with his gentle, collected demeanor, having a go at anyone.

"So, do you know anything about what's going on?" she asked.

The druid shook his head. "Nothing, I fear," he replied simply. "I was forced to retreat from the grove just after I arrived. A nest of trolls has taken residence there and there were too many of them for me to overcome on my own." He hesitated, glancing at Coprith, but then went on. "This is a cause for some alarm. Druids would not tolerate such creatures, especially not within their grove."

"Then the Druids are either dead or gone or… something," Valla muttered. She looked down at Jan. "Killing trolls requires fire or acid, if I remember right. It stops them from regenerating. And as much as Edwin likes his fire, even he has his limits and we don't know how big the nest is. Any ideas?"

The gnome scratched his scruffy chin. "I think I got something. They call it Alchemist's Fire. It ain't very strong and it doesn't affect a very big area, but once you get a troll knocked down, it ought to finish the job."

"Then when we to the inn I want you to make as much as you can tonight—enough for each of us to carry a few flasks."

"Gotcha."

Valla looked back to Cernd. "Anything we should know about the grove?"

"It sits at the center of a large, wooded marsh," he replied. "The vegetation is thick and the path obscured. You will need a guide."

"Are you volunteering?"

"If you would like. It takes two flints to make a fire."

She smiled. "Well, that's settled. Now, will you stay here another night or come to the inn with us? I'm sure Jaheira would be really glad to meet you."

Cernd's expression tightened. "As much as I dislike the idea of further imposing on Lord Coprith's charity, my presence outside of these walls may cause complications for you and your friends."

Valla couldn't help but laugh. "Ha! Yes, well, you haven't met the people I travel with. I suspect you'll be the least of the town folk's worries." She looked to Coprith. "We'll be back."

* * *

Valla had been able to anticipate at least one thing when walking into Trademeet's inn: that if the innkeeper or any patron had a problem with Cernd's presence their problem went unvoiced when he took a seat with the heavily armed group consisting of not just an Inquisitior of the Order, but also a drow priestess, an enormous Rashemi berserker, and a Red Wizard.

What she couldn't predict was the ear-splitting shriek that came from the bar. "You! You're one of them! Gods, another Child—!"

The others were out of their seats before Valla had even managed to lay eyes on the wastrel—a harried and bedraggled looking man dressed in rogue's leathers that had seen better days once upon a time.

He had stumbled out of his stool at the bar and was backed up against it, staring at her with wild, white-rimmed eyes.

"Who are you?" she demanded. Gray and distant memories of the Friendly Arm and her first night at Nashkel played in her mind. "If you're a hunter, I'll gut you!"

"—I didn't come this far just to die now!"

Then he was gone with a crash of thunder and a flash of light that left every witness briefly deaf and blind.

Even after their senses returned, no one dared speak.

Valla glanced around, taking stock of the others. Somewhere between the man's utterance of the word "Child" and his abrupt departure, weapons had been drawn all around so the table temporarily prickled with blades and magic.

It made her unreasonably giddy.

Then: "You!"

It was the innkeeper, poised behind the bar and looking understandably agitated. He would have been standing closest when that spell—whatever it was—had been cast, but it was clear that he wasn't yelling because he was yet to reclaim his hearing.

"You brought that druid in here and look—!"

A small purse socked him square in the face, cutting off whatever tirade he had been winding into.

Valla's well of patience was quite dry and she couldn't even take what petty pleasure there was to be found in hitting the man vicariously. The day had been long, everyone in this town was unpleasant with the exception of their employer, and she hadn't even had time to take her sodden cloak off before more _weird_ was shoveled into her lap. "Lord Coprith hired us and _that_ druid to sort out the problems with the Grove. Unless you want him to leave. Then, after the animals have eaten your militia, maybe you can take a post at the gate and lure them away with that gut of yours," she said. Then she indicated the teleported man's vacated bar stool. "We want his room. That coin should cover the charges. Yoshimo, Edwin—follow me."

* * *

_Apologies for the delay._

_More apologies for the detour down Stuff We Know Lane for Haer'Dalis' sake but I feel like the Dead Three is a pretty pivotal part of the "mythos" here and it's important to remember that even Bhaal was once just a dude. An assassin and probably a jerk because that work doesn't attract cuddly people by nature, but a dude nonetheless._

_Also the Gods War? That horrible thing around which a lot of events in DnD history circles? It last just over all of four months if I remember right. I guess the writers figured that if it went on any longer there wouldn't be any gods or Faerun left to write about._


	12. Hunt

"Edwin."

Yoshimo had entered the room first with noiseless, feather-light steps and swept the floor, the windows, the drawers, and the bed for traps. He then crossed the floorboards from one end to the other with intentional, toe-heel movements trying to make the panels bounce or squawk to giveaway a hidden cubby.

There was nothing.

With a bow, the thief retreated to rejoin the others downstairs.

"_Ed-wiin_."

There was, maybe not surprisingly, little to the room overall. It was one of the inn's cheapest accommodations and the furnishings were all that could be expected of that—a wobbly nightstand, a musty footlocker, and a straw mattress with threadbare covers.

Nothing above, beneath, or hidden. Nothing to indicate who had come or gone.

But Valla was, admittedly, distracted from her task at hand, more preoccupied by the storm cloud hanging over her wizard's head.

She approached him carefully and surveyed the stoic picture he made at the center of the room. He wasn't going to talk on his own, but nagging him would just make him more stubborn about it.

So, she planted her feet and leaned.

At first, it was a matter of finding a comfortable place to plant her shoulder against his back. The man was almost all bone it seemed so there was a trick to finding a spot that wouldn't grind painfully into her. That done, she began sinking her weight into him like she was a slowly melting candle, going so far as to roll her head back and forth against the breadth of his back.

Impressively enough, Edwin didn't move at all at first. When she began to push in earnest, he shuffled his feet to rebalance his weight. Finally, however, she forced him forward a full step and she followed closely to keep herself pressed into him, so that his weight was pitched forward and she was tipped backwards over him, draped on his back like a bit of linen.

This forced a laugh right out of him—a quiet huff of amusement that was stifled quickly.

"You are a _child_," he scolded, shoving his weight back against her to force them both upright again.

"Me?" she demanded, nudging back against him and grinning when she met resistance. "Which of us is pouting?"

"I am not _pouting_, you amorous cow."

Valla couldn't help but laugh aloud at that as she gave up and came around to face him directly. "Cow? Well, I feel downright nostalgic now. But least you're not ignoring me." She glanced around the room and then looked back at him and gestured. "So?"

Edwin spared the small quarters another cursory glance and then shook his head. "There is no magic here—no rites or rituals have been performed in this space. No mage has even recently slept here."

"And that thunderous teleportation?"

"Rather defeats the point of teleporting," he sniffed haughtily as he approached the bed and laid one hand flat on the mattress. "To come and go quietly is one of the advantages of magical aportation, is it not?"

She conceded his point with a quiet sound. Moving to the window, she inspected the frame and swept her fingertips over the sill, frowning at the dust that gathered on her gloves. No one had come or gone this way in the days past. "He said something right before," she said finally as she turned back to look at the wizard. "What was it?"

Edwin looked at her, narrowing his eyes as he thought. "'You're one of them. Another child'." He frowned at the bed and then swept the room again with a long look as he straightened to his full height. "So, he knew that you were Bhaalspawn."

"Seems that way," she agreed. "Although, if he was a hunter, teleporting seems to be working against him."

The wizard shook his head. "I do not believe he was. Who can sense the Taint?"

"Anyone proficient enough with holy magicks," Valla replied with a shrug. Then a frown slowly crept upon her face. "And other Bhaalspawn."

Edwin had crossed the room to join her at the window and pitched his weight against the wall to lean upon it as he looked at her. "Could you not sense _him_?"

She frowned and looked away. Staring at the grime that coated the window panes, she thought back to her first steps into the inn. Jan's quiet, quick steps at her left and Cernd just behind her. The smothering warmth of the tavern—roasting meat and pipe tobacco underlined with fear and desperation—and then the reassuring presence of those she knew with Haer'Dalis' otherness pulsing at the center, all of it hedged by a blend of familiar magicks.

Valla shook off the memory and looked at Edwin again. "I didn't notice him until he began screaming. What does that mean?"

The wizard shook his head, but his brow had begun to pinch at the center, giving away the turmoil of his thoughts. "Nothing. Your mind has not fully recovered and you were not concentrating on him," he said finally, his tone cautious. "And it could be coincidence that he was here at all. What are the odds that your travels would remain unhindered by more of your siblings when they are supposedly so numerous?"

Slowly, she nodded, but it was an anemic explanation at best. They both knew it. "Why do you think he was so terrified?"

Edwin shrugged, but his eyes were boring into her with a heavy, critical weight. "He spoke of you as "another Child". Perhaps he has heard the stories from the north or maybe he has met others of your kith. Or maybe it was you." His lips twisted into a wry smirk. "I know not how you appear to others of the Taint. Perhaps you are even uglier to them."

Valla found herself smiling, for there was no bite to his insult. It was as close to reconciliation as she would ever wring from his miserable lips. Even so. "You understand why I had to tell them…"

"I understand that you seek the paladin's approval."

"Edwin…"

He had placed his back to one of the walls and allowed himself to lean there, his arms folded. The sharp angles of his face were made harsher by the dim light and jumping shadows cast by the room's single lantern. "He is beholden to his god first. You know this. He bows to his god, his Order, their tenants, the law, and then somewhere at the bottom of all of those rules and vows you are but a footnote, no matter how much he may _care_." He leveled her with a look then and narrowed his eyes. "You must concern yourself with practicality first and pleasing his dogma last."

He probably wasn't wrong. It was the worst part of his ability to see things with such detached pragmatism.

Keldorn's path didn't allow the same elbow room hers had. Sunites understood and celebrated the shades of gray in the world, but those who worshipped Torm saw only the black and white.

"Why does he worry you so much?" she asked. "Is it the Inquisitor thing?"

Nothing much had been made of it before. She hadn't even thought to ask, because they were in _Amn_. They were in Athkatla. In a city that outlawed the use of magic, most acting paladins were trained Inquisitors. In fact, it had seemed like a good idea to have Keldorn around, given who they were to face.

"That is trivial at best. I have dealt with his ilk in the past and will again in the future."

"So, it _is_ just because he's a paladin." Valla shifted her weight and looked away, trying to formulate the best response she could. "You do realize that if I could, I would go _back_, right? I didn't Fall on _purpose_."

He snorted. "That is another matter entirely. Even had you not Fallen, you were different."

"Because I wasn't an Inquisitor?"

"Because you have always understood necessity. He will ask you to choose."

"Choose what?"

Edwin shrugged. "The drow, me, your tiefling if he isn't careful. In time he will leverage his approval against—"

"He hasn't even _said_ anything—!"

"_Yet_."

Valla frowned at him. She wanted to dismiss him out of hand and tell him that he was being paranoid, because Keldorn was almost assuredly not conspiring against him or the others.

That didn't mean he was wrong, though.

Keldorn had vows to think of and rules to abide by. Maybe asking him to continue tolerating a Sharran priestess and a Red Wizard would eventually prove too much?

She shook her head, scattering the thoughts. "You don't really think I'd let him rearrange the whole party? Just because I appeased him today?" She scoffed. "Edwin, that's called leading. It happens. I seem to recall having to cater to you for your cooperation more than once." She fixed him with a wry looked and a half-smile. "I know you like to think I'm some sheltered lamb about to be fleeced by every other person I so much as speak to, but I like to think I've adapted pretty well."

He snorted. "Yes and your cadre of nannies work tirelessly to keep you out of further trouble. Speaking of which…" His lips twisted a little, but she couldn't decipher his expression. "Another is to join us?"

"Cernd. He's from a druid grove nearby."

"The one sending all their cuddly animal-kin to eat the helpless peons here, you mean."

"A different one, as it happens. He came to investigate the reason for the cuddly animal people-eating nonsense."

"And in your great wisdom you decided that we needed another tree-hugger eating from our meager stores of supplies…?"

"Because it sounded like a lot of fun to get lost in the grove and die there, maybe eaten by bears or something, but that's not exactly the ending that's going to get Imoen rescued." She gave him a critical onceover and then reached out and smoothed a hand over a wrinkle in his robe. "Are we all right now? Are we at least on speaking terms again?"

Edwin scoffed and eyed her lazily. "Will I find myself abandoned in the woods at a word from the holy knight?"

"_No_. I need you, as you well know."

He tried to appear neutral and unaffected by this, but there was no mistaking he way he rolled his shoulders and _preened_ at her words. "Yes, well, one could hardly expect you to make it without me. Look at what happened when we last parted."

Valla rolled her eyes. "Right." She measured him for a moment with her stare and then a sly smile curled over her lips. "You know, we should discuss this sudden neediness of _yours_—"

"I can leave _now_ if that—"

She laughed and grabbed him by the shoulders as he tried to elbow by her on his way to the door. Forcing his back against the wall again, she pinned him there by leaning against his chest. "_Stay_," she said even as he scowled stormily at her. She smiled back. "And if it would please his highness, I'll speak to Keldorn as well. Good enough?"

"Wonderful. Now, are you quite finished manhandling me?"

* * *

_There had never been another child in the monastery. People went to Candlekeep, for the most part, to retire and considered themselves passed such an age. On the rare occasion that one of the younger people did marry—usually one of the Watchers—they left to begin their life anew elsewhere. _

_ For as long as she had been there, Valla was the youngest person in the fortress, excepting the handful of children she met who were travelling with their important fathers or tutors, who were too busy or too high-born to play with her._

_ This meant finding her own means of entertainment. And bless the monks and the Watchers, they tried. Books and daggers and paints for her birthdays, dresses and new toys for every occasion in between—she never wanted for much of anything. Hull and the others made it a point to take her with them when they patrolled the coast, where she learned to fish and swim and swear. Gorion filled every other hour with study or remedial lessons bursting with magic and stories._

_ It was the most a lonely child could hope for, really._

_ "Hiya, my name's Imoen!"_

_ So considering the above, it was reasonable that Valla just about fell backwards when a scruffy pink _thing_ besieged her fortress crafted of books and blankets under a table in one of the reading rooms._

_ "Do you wanna play? Are you really readin' that? _Can_ you read? I can't. Can you teach me?"_

_ Valla blinked at what she had deduced was another _girl_ staring out at her from beneath a mane of tangled pink hair, whose face was all freckles and roundness and at least three missing baby teeth._

_ "You really can't read?" she asked at last._

_ The other girl shook her head vigorously._

_ Valla glanced around the tight space under the table and then reached over to push aside a few books to make room. "Does the Reader know you're here?"_

_ Imoen crawled into the spot and pulled her legs up tight under her. "Maybe! But I'm hidin', so shhh!"_

_ Valla made a face. "If they find you here, Ulraunt will blame me."_

_ "Why?"_

_ "I don't know. He blames me for everything."_

_ "Well, I'ma bite him if he does, because you're my friend." The girl paused and then curled her nose in thought. "We're gonna be friends, right?"_

_ Valla lifted her arms in an exaggerated shrug. "I don't know. I never had any friends."_

_ "Me neither! See?! We're gonna be best friends!" _

* * *

"You have not slept."

Valla turned her head and acknowledged Cernd's approach with a smile.

The inn was almost empty at this, the very crack of dawn. Only the staff could be hear thumping around in the kitchen, getting things ready for the morning meals and preparing for the day and from the corner of her eye she saw the innkeeper every now and then watching her from the bar as he went about his chores.

"Dreams," she said. Then, she added, without thinking: "Memories…"

The druid settled into a seat opposite of hers at the table. It was tucked away in a dark, private corner, too far for prying ears or eyes to wander. "You might have woken me," he said. "I could have offered you something to take."

She smiled. He had settled in rather easily with the group at large. The night before she had watched him flummox handfuls of gold right out of Yoshimo and Keldorn, because he might have given up the earthly world for a life of contemplation in the wild, but being esoteric and confounding apparently made one a pretty good poker player regardless.

"I don't like sleep remedies," she said. "They leave me groggy. Besides these were… not unpleasant. Maybe another night."

The thought had summoned to mind the lethargic sluggishness she had felt in the moments reprieve Irenicus allowed between his attentions and she banished the memories as quickly as she could.

Cernd nodded, though he looked unconvinced. After considering her a moment longer, he spoke again: "I did not thank you. Some would say that it was too kind of you to take me under your wing so quickly."

"I know exactly who would say that," she agreed. "But if Coprith truly thought you the dangerous one, he would not have bothered protecting you."

He nodded slowly and went back to watching her.

Valla frowned, her eyes moving from the way he thumbed the rough surface of the table to his eyes that were focused on something just over her shoulder. "Something's bothering you," she concluded.

The man lifted his brows in question and then shook his head. "No. It is a matter best left for later, lest we spoil this crop before harvest."

Fair enough. She hadn't beaten Edwin's secrets out of him yet either. "I was thinking of doing a little scouting this morning," she said. "I thought we could look for another path into the grove."

"Or we could make one."

She grinned at the druid. "I like the way you think."

* * *

_Short but I wanted to update to prove I was not dead  
_

_Also I realize I have not done this previously and would like to do it now: A big thanks to everyone who has reviewed thus far and to those who let me bounce ideas off of them and everyone who has even so much as glanced at this._


	13. Trust

This was not what Valla had intended when she and Cernd had set off earlier. She had meant to scout the area and maybe get an idea of the environment and the numbers they might be facing. Then they would go back, regroup with the others, and press forward together.

So, when she and Cernd found themselves lost in the thick of the swamp, it was maybe not surprising but definitely not ideal.

"I didn't think you could _get_ lost as a druid," she said.

"Groves have means of protecting themselves from intruders."

"So, the trees got us lost? That's… not reassuring."

The druid's lips pulled again into a half-smile that was quickly becoming quite familiar, but then he paused and turned his head sharply. Motioning for Valla's silence, but also to stay close, he took a few cautious steps forward.

A clearing opened up nearly twenty yards ahead of them, which was where they stumbled on their first real problem and Valla knew it was a problem even before they had truly breached the clearing because she recognized blood and dark magic by smell alone any more.

And there they were, a circle of druids—just three of them—gathered around a pile of remains. It took getting closer to realize that the remains were human bodies and that the skin had been flayed from the bone and muscle.

"You there! Who are you to tread upon this sacred—?"

Valla had already drawn her sword and before the leader could finish speaking, she had beheaded the nearest supplicant in a single swing. Following through in a complete circle, she drove her pommel into the next—once into their chest and then their throat.

Cernd went directly for the leader with a swiftness that caught her off guard. With his hand glowing a nauseous green, he grabbed the man by the throat and slammed him back against the nearest tree with so much force Valla thought she heard something crack. Then the man's skin began to rash and welt, blistering and blackening where Cernd touched him. His mistake then was attempting to pry Cernd's fingers away, because the necrotizing effect of the spell simply spread.

"What has happened here?" Cernd demanded with such force that it surprised Valla.

There was something terrible and _predatory_ about him in that moment, with his teeth bared and his eyes filled with hateful fire. It made the fine hairs at the back of her neck bristle and she found herself taking a reflexive step away from him.

"What have you _done_? You defiled this ground with innocent blood! These people—look at them!"

The other druid coughed and one of his hands groped yet at Cernd's arm as the other dug at the tree behind him, seeking something that might pull him free. "We have shown them their sins!" he protested. "We will take back what is ours and purify the filth—"

A violent shake cut off the diatribe before it could begin and the infection continued to spread from Cernd's touch. "This is _not_ the way of things!" he snapped. "These lives were sacred! The grove is screaming! Can you not hear it? Why did you not simply light the trees afire if you wished to inflict this much pain?"

"Faldorn has shown us the way! She will—!"

There was a sickening crunch and a gurgle. It took Valla a second to realize that Cernd had, with one hand, crushed the man's throat. He stepped away and let the body fall to the ground at his feet and stared at it in silence, his whole body tense with a quiet, burning rage.

Valla was speechless. It wasn't the most horrifying thing she had ever seen—and she wished that wasn't such a long list—but she would have never expected Cernd capable of such a display.

He must have sensed her unease, because he turned to look at her. Again, his eyes glittered oddly in the light that managed to trickle down through the canopy above them and there was that distinct feral look to him that he had not shaken.

"I apologize," he said, with the same quiet calm she had come to know him for. "I abhor violence. I do…" His fingers tightened around his staff as he searched for the words. He looked then to the bodies that were heaped at the clearing's center and stared at them as he let out a long breath. The anger was gone then, all at once, replaced with palpable grief as he stared. "Why do we never tire of doing terrible things to each other?"

She looked at the bodies too and the disgust she felt that brought bile up to tickle the back of her throat helped her crush the giddy excitement that danced at the fringes of senses. "There's nothing we can do here," she said at last. "The smell is going to draw other predators and we aren't equipped to fight much of anything on our own."

Some unreadable emotion registered briefly on Cernd's face, but vanished just as quickly, and he nodded. "I know." He glanced one way and then another. Then he gestured to her. "This way. The trees will let us pass now, I think. They… wanted us here. To witness this. To stop it."

That was not as reassuring as he seemed to think it should be.

Valla's eyes darted about, checking the clearing one last time for any signs that their fight had drawn further attention. Then she hurried after Cernd, choosing to carry her sword rather than sheath it again, lest they encounter more trouble.

"The name he mentioned—Faldorn…" She glanced up at the druid beside her and caught his eye before going on. Their pace was brisk, as if they were both hoping they could out-run any further complications. "I met a woman by that name when I was travelling the Sword Coast. We worked together to see a mining operation fronted by the Iron Throne destroyed, but she was a Shadow Druid and there were… conflicts. We did not remain together long. I wouldn't be surprised if she came south."

His brows raised fractionally. "Surprising you couldn't find middle ground, even with a Shadow Druid, given the diversity of the group you travel with."

"Yes, so you can imagine how disagreeable she was." She snorted. "I believe slavery came up at some point or another when we were discussing the treatment of the workers in the mines. She thought it was more noble to put the "man-beast" to work than to train an animal to do it. She congratulated Edwin on the fact that his country understood such and when you've made a Thayan uncomfortable with your views on slavery, you've reached some sort of rock bottom." She sighed. "If she is the one that's taken the grove it means we're going to meet heavy resistance. I mean, they're obviously not prisoners here; they're on _her_ side. So, are you… prepared for that? I understand if you want to maybe defer this to Jaheira…"

"I will do no such thing." Cernd's lip curled in a snarl. "All of those who were complicit in these acts of barbarism must be punished for them. But our laws are clear. Faldorn has betrayed our most basic tenants and she must die for this. Tell me that you understand that."

Valla drew her shoulders back. "I understand, Cernd."

That seemed to bring him some peace. "Very well. Then we should retrieve the others and see to this mess."

* * *

Jaheira and Viconia had both been quick to scold Valla for wandering off on her own and only let up when they were assured by Cernd that firstly, she hadn't been alone, and secondly, it had proven quite necessary in the end. Learning that Shadow Druids were in the grove and responsible for the animal attacks and the disappearances of the previous scouts was exactly what they needed to prepare to enter it again.

Valla made it a point to sulk in their direction.

"You are certain these are Shadow Druids?"

"I suspected as much before, but what we witnessed and what Valla told me confirmed it. The flaying and disposal of the bodies in such a manner is similar to a ritual I witnessed once previously," Cernd explained. He was outwardly calm, but there was an undercurrent of agitation in his movements and he paced before the fire like a great, caged beast. "I believe that this Faldorn is taking the life from the grove in order to bolster her own strength. When I stood there among the trees today, I could feel it. She is slowly killing the grove—torturing it, essentially."

They had retreated to the High Merchant's manor to speak aloud without frightening any eavesdropping townsfolk or inciting a mob that would just march off as fodder for the trolls. In the den, the fire was warm and they were gathered close on the couches and in the chairs.

Yoshimo had a knee drawn to his chest and was resting his chin upon it. "And if we kill this Faldorn? Will the grove recover?"

Cernd hesitated. "It depends on how badly she has hurt it, but I am optimistic. She has not been at this for long and if she were powerful enough to kill it quickly she would not need to resort to drawing such power from it. Valla, who will join us?"

The swamp was difficult to maneuver, so Valla chose to limit the party's numbers. It would put them at a disadvantage fighting the trolls, but so would getting stuck in the brambles or falling in the bogs.

Jaheira and Cernd were her two immediate choices, for obvious reasons, and then after much consideration, she chose Edwin and Haer'Dalis.

Edwin snorted. "You could not spare my robe the stains?" he asked. "_The burden of being needed. So bothersome_."

"Goddess willing she will lose you in a bog," Viconia answered sweetly. She looked to the others and raised her brows with something akin to expectance. "Try not to die. We still have countless idiots to save from their self-wrought misfortunes." Then she and Jaheira met eyes and they shared a nod that communicated a vast amount of knowledge in a tiny gesture only they understood.

Valla was too focused elsewhere to notice, though. "_How_ many did you make?"

Jan had presented two entire crates of alchemist's fire packaged and ready for transport. "Well, the druid called it a troll _nest_. How many's a _nest_?"

"This isn't an educated guess, Jan, but I'm going to say _not_ this many."

She would have to remind herself to factor gnome productivity into the next favor she asked of him to avoid this in the future.

Keldorn pinched the bridge of his nose. "This is a hazard," he said. "The manor will go up like a tinderbox if something's not done with these."

"We're only going to carry a few each," Valla protested. "I need my hands for things other than humping these around. Also, I think the idea is to maybe avoid burning the grove to the ground. We'll call that plan F."

Jan shrugged. "Then we just pack 'em in the cart and take them with us when we leave."

"Our flammable cart, Jan? Packed with all of our worldly possessions, including our trail supplies and _us_?"

"I don't scratch what you're itchin' at, Vee?"

She rolled her eyes. "We're going to take what we can carry and you're going to sell the rest before we leave Trademeet."

"Well, they aren't turnips, but I'll see what I can do."

Valla nodded and looked to Keldorn. "You'll…"

He waved a hand. "I'll see to things here while you are away," he said.

She glanced around the room, at Viconia who was lounging in calm repose on one of the couches and Haer'Dalis badgering Cernd for details about what made a Shadow Druid so very shadowy, and Edwin's words came back to her.

She loved Keldorn. She respected him; relied on him for the steady arm he provided when the Taint felt like it was going to rob her of her sense and reason. In the days since escaping Irenicus' dungeon and coming to think of the Radiant Heart as something like a makeshift home, he had become her shelter too.

"Keldorn?"

"Hm?"

Valla looked at him and fumbled for the words. "Nothing," she concluded after a moment longer. She smiled. "Just keep everyone safe."

His brow pinched a bit, giving away his concern, but he nodded. "Aye."

This time alone would be telling enough, she decided as she turned away. And if it came to the worst, Yoshimo and Minsc could, hopefully, keep anything truly catastrophic from happening.

* * *

It had not been over-difficult to navigate the marsh this time. Their small group was able to remain fairly close, which cut the chances of falling prey to any natural hazards the environment presented, and Jan's alchemist's fire dispatched the trolls quickly without setting any brush fires alight.

Cernd steered them away from the troll's nest, the direction of which became obvious because of the smell and the increasing number of the beasts they encountered. Their main concern was the sanctuary and the druids, once released of the Shadow Druid's cult influence, could chase off the remaining trolls and burn the nest, he said. Which sounded fine to Valla, who didn't envy them the task and wouldn't fight for the honor of it.

And then the sanctuary at long last.

Faldorn was probably prepared for a lot of things. She certainly seemed prepared for them as they entered the sanctuary. She was already pacing, filled with all of the arrogant vigor that Valla had found unlikable about her before. But she didn't seem to recognize them and the Bhaalspawn couldn't decide just how offended by that she ought to really be.

The sanctuary itself was _probably_ not what it had been. Valla imagined there were far too many skulls on display, most of them human, and there was that scent of dark magic tickling her nose again. The druids themselves were watching them closely, all of them dark-eyed and exhausted, and the dogs that gathered with them were mangy, ungroomed things pacing at their heels.

Throughout, there was a sense that everything living here was suffering greatly in one way or another.

Except Faldorn, who was in her glory on the raised stone slab at the center of the sanctuary, where she postured and preened.

"The interlopers at last! I felt you enter the grove and was wondering when you would make it here! Come then, approach and speak if you have anything worthwhile to say before you die!"

Behind Valla, she heard Edwin snort. "I am truly glad your tendency to collect people as one might stray kittens has its limits…"

Jaheira nudged him sharply in the ribs and shushed him.

Valla found herself at a loss for what to say, but there was no need. Cernd cut her off with a surprising ease as he stepped forward and waved her aside. "I will speak," he said. He looked then to the woman in her blood-stained leathers and ghastly war paint and his nose curled. "Though, there is no need for words. I have witnessed the crimes of those that follow you. I can feel the life being drained out of the earth I stand on as I speak. This is not the way of things and I challenge your leadership, by the rites dictated in our laws. Do you accept this?"

She smirked back. "I revel in the combat of the rituals and I welcome the chance to end your miserable life!"

He nodded solemnly in answer and a murmur rippled through the chamber when Faldorn lept down in front of him. With surprising amicability between them they turned together and began to walk toward the pit on the other side of the sanctuary.

"Okay, what's going on?" Valla asked quickly, looking back at Jaheira. "What did he just do?"

Jaheira shifted the grip on her shield uncomfortably as they began to move with those gathered. "It is trial by combat. You might call it a duel. The survivor will rightfully lead the grove."

"So, this is how it fell into Faldorn's hands to begin with?"

"Very probably."

Valla glanced around the sanctuary and felt the press of the anxiety and the magic. "Then why aren't we _helping_ him?"

"We cannot. It would render the ritual moot and free the other druids here to attack us," Jaheira said and her eyes swept over those that had gathered again. She looked to Valla. "Cernd seems to believe that he is capable. You have to trust that."

Valla looked to Edwin and Haer'Dalis both for help, but they were concentrating on the gathering druids as they spread out to watch the fight unfold below them. So she looked instead to Cernd.

If Cernd was worried or if the prospect of the duel daunted him at all, it didn't show on his face. Instead, he shed his cloak and folded it once before laying it and his staff neatly together on dirt floor. Then he dropped with surprising grace down into the makeshift ring. She was reminded again of the sheer, surprising size of the man and the bulk of the muscle he carried.

Then Faldorn discarded her weapons as well and leapt into the pit with an obvious eagerness glittering darkly in her eyes and it seeded more doubts. Cernd looked capable enough physically, but Faldorn's every facet was that of someone who had lived a life honed by the wilderness to become as much a predator as the beasts that dwelled there.

The Shadow Druid circled. "This won't take but a minute," she growled. "Go on then, _brother_. You came here to stop me, didn't you? Tell me of my crimes."

Cernd shook his head. "You know what you've done and I will not give you the satisfaction of hearing another speak of it." He adjusted his vambrace and dug his toes into the dirt floor, prepared to meet her challenge. "After today, there will be no need to acknowledge you ever again."

Faldorn snarled and lunged. Valla regretted not having told Cernd more about her—that she had preferred shapeshifting, that she had been raised among a barbarian tribe in the north and reveled in close combat over spellcasting, that she had been _good_ at it.

But it quickly became apparent that whatever Faldorn had planned on when this confrontation came, it hadn't been Cernd.

They both shapeshifted and when Faldorn reached Cernd mid-step, wearing the sleek, compact form of the panther, she was met by a wall of fur and rebuffed by the swing of a massive forearm that swept her aside like dust. It took a jarring second to accept that lumbering beast of fang and black hair in the pit was really the quiet, taciturn Circle druid and in that time he lunged again to attack.

_Werewolf_.

Whatever chances Faldorn had seemed to abandon her the second Cernd changed. She was faster, sleek and agile, but he was bigger and stronger and when she did manage to leapt passed his guard and lock her jaws around his throat, it didn't seem to do anything but give him a chance to grab hold of her and slam her into the wall of the pit with bone-shattering force.

It was probably what Valla should have expected of what was essentially a duel to the death, no matter how many rituals or laws governed it. This was also when she suspected she had come to think of druids too much as slightly dirtier wizards with bare feet when this brutal, merciless display was probably much closer to their truer natures and had little overall to do with Faldorn's cult or whatever Cernd actually was.

The fight wasn't over as quickly as Faldorn had predicted, but the finality of it came suddenly and it didn't favor the Shadow Druid.

She lost the hold of her transformation after another blow from Cernd took her off her feet. His fur was becoming increasingly matted with blood and his breathing seemed labored, but none of his feral power waned while she was struggling to pull together the strings of a spell as she scuttled away.

Cernd gave her no reprieve and closed the gap, drawing an arm back to strike—

Valla turned her head to avoid watching the final blow as it landed. For the most part, it had nothing to do with squeamishness. It was simply to deny the part of her that would have reveled in the sight of it. And it was easy enough to do, but she could feel the Taint react with a childish anger. She felt it seethe and twist inside of her, incited by the violence and hateful of her resistance.

With more ease that had come to her in the previous weeks, she pushed it away and looked to Jaheira for guidance. The druid gestured to the pit and the two of them, carefully, approached.

Cernd saw them and, still holding the form of the werewolf, approached the wall and with an unsurprising strength pulled himself up and out of the pit. At this proximity, he was enormous and intimidating. Then, all at once, the transformation gave away and he stumbled.

Valla reached out automatically to help him catch his balance and he hesitated before letting his weight lean into her. His open wounds—the gouges where Faldorn had bit into his neck and where her claws had torn open his pelt—were still bleeding freely and left his clothes a tacky mess. She knew that, given time, he would regenerate and they would heal quicker than they would for anyone else, but the bite marks at least had to be seen to, didn't they?

"Jaheira?" Cernd looked tiredly at the woman. "Would you address them? Tell them that they are safe—"

She waved him off. "Of course. I will send messengers into the wood as well. Maybe there are others who fled when Faldorn took power here. Valla, find someplace for him to lay and start cleaning his wounds."

"That isn't necessary."

The half-elf gave him a dark-look that brooked no further argument and he rasped out a laugh and let Valla lead him away.

* * *

The grove was in no condition to be left, but Cernd was in no condition to remain either, despite his protests that he had slept on countless stone floors in his life and would begin regenerating before the night was out. Even so, Jaheira and Valla agreed that the half-elf would stay behind with the grove while they reported back to Trademeet. Then they would return the following morning to fetch her.

"There is still the looming fact that Trademeet has no _trade_ at present."

"I know, Keldorn. One problem at a time."

Leaving the grove had none of the challenge presented by entering it and they arrived again at Trademeet sometime after sundown.

Cernd's bloody clothes and opened wounds drew strange looks from the townsfolk loitering at the bar and around the inn's hearth, but there was nothing said. Valla had shouted for a bath to be brought up and then began the awkward three-legged hobble up the stairs.

Now, he was being seen to by Viconia and, finally confident that she could, Valla had a chance to breathe for the first time all day and promptly collapsed in one of the couches near the hearth upstairs.

"You should bathe and see if the priestess has wolfsbane."

Valla looked to Keldorn, who was standing by the fire, the picture of tension throughout every limb and muscle despite the modest tumbler of whiskey he was sipping from.

"He didn't bite me, Keldorn."

"You were covered in his blood."

She rolled her eyes and wanted to point out that she hadn't exactly been sitting there lapping it off her skin, but settled for a dutiful nod. "Yes, all right. I'll talk to Vicky after she's done."

"…Did he seem in control?"

Valla didn't bother hiding her exasperation then. "Keldorn, if he were some feral monster, we would have noticed long before this point, I think. Yes, he seemed perfectly rational. Even after he changed."

He scrubbed at his face with his hand and then turned to her. "How are you so calm about these things?" he asked, dropping into the armchair opposite of hers. His tone was genuinely curious. "I can't… I don't have that anymore. When I was young I could throw such caution to the wind, but I suppose in my dotage…"

"Your _dotage_?" Valla couldn't help but laugh. "I _can't_ with this attitude anymore, Keldorn. You act like you're a feeble old man tottering about an estate in his dressing gown and slippers. You aren't too old to accept new things. I think you've just been in Amn too long. Or the Order. I can't decide. Or maybe I find it hard to judge since I'm a murder baby. I don't know."

Keldorn attempted to suppress a laugh at this, but failed and it came out as a quiet chuckling scoff. He shook his head. "I know that you and wizard have been talking."

"Yes, we do that."

In truth, she didn't want to have this conversation tonight, but she could sense the direction the wind was blowing. Really, she should have known better than to think it could be put off for long. Edwin had pressed her subtly the rest of the night after their talk and she should have known that Keldorn would pick it up.

"You seem close," the paladin said gravely.

"Don't say that too loudly. Edwin would rather set his hair on fire than give that impression."

"He's a poisonous influence, Valla. It makes me worry for you."

She sighed. "It isn't like that, Keldorn."

"His ilk is very good at making it seem such, Valla. You're young. It is kind that you think you can change him—"

The laughter burst out of Valla in an incredulous "_Ha_!" before she could properly stifle it. When met with Keldorn's unimpressed frown, she raised her eyebrows. "Oh, you're serious."

Frustrated, he stood. "If my opinions are unwelcomed-"

Rolling her eyes, she waved him back into his seat. "Stop, stop," she scolded. "I can't help it that you sound _insane_."

He eyed her stormily and she met his look with an unapologetic stare.

"I am doing what I believe is my duty to you."

With a sigh, Valla raised her hands in a show of surrender. This wasn't getting off to a very good start. "Fine. Edwin is… not perfect. Don't tell him, he'd die. He's cuddly like an Ooze and he has the moral fiber of a kobold, but he has always done right by the group. And by me. Trust me, he's had his chances to turn on us, but he never _has_. Well, the one time after the Gate, but I still trust there were good reasons."

"Valla—"

She raised her hand to shush him. "And I can't tell you how much I _resent_ the idea that after getting to know me you think I'm some doe-eyed girl swooning over a handsome foreigner and I'm going to _hit_ you if you say it again, Keldorn." She raised her eyebrows meaningfully and was gratified at the way he started. "I get it. I'm young. I'm a lot younger than you. That's why I want you along. You have so much more experience than I do and even Jaheira's out of her depth in Amn. But I can't do this if you're going to keep looking at me like a little girl you need to protect from all the evils in the world. A part of me… it _is_ that evil." She looked at him with sad, matter-of-factness and shrugged. "You need to trust me and you need to trust this group. That means Edwin and Viconia."

For a long time, Keldorn said nothing. He stared pensively into the fire, his drink forgotten in his hand, as his brow pinched and his mouth worried the inside of his lip. At last, he spoke. "You trust them. But that may not be enough for me to do the same, Valla. I'm sorry."

"Then get to know them."

He snorted. "How?"

Valla shrugged. "Admittedly, Edwin may not let you at this point. He's convinced you're going to leave him to starve in the woods or something. But you and Viconia are both religious people. Start there." She paused and then added, tentatively: "And maybe try—just _try-_to reserve your judgement."

Keldorn frowned, but he said nothing. He looked up when she stood and raised his brows in a silent question.

"I'm off to bed," she said. "In the morning I'm taking Haer'Dalis to speak to the Djinn and we'll plan from there. With any luck this business will be settled by the afternoon." She patted his shoulder as she passed. "Good night, Keldorn."

* * *

_If this chapter is a mess it's because I rearranged it sixty squintillion times._

_Also, welcome to my attempt to make Cernd more interesting. More to come on that front._

_Overall that's not how I planned on Valla's talk with Keldorn going, but I kind of like it? idk_

_Tell me what you think._

_Edit: I went back and rewrote Valla's conversation with Keldorn._


End file.
